the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Derrida, Kandinsky, and the Force of Art

By Carl Raschke

Deconstruction and the Force of Language

Ever since I finished with my graduate seminar on Derrida this past spring I've been looking quite differently at what was always at stake in "post-structuralism" - what years ago we called postmodernism in philosophy before the latter word took hold.  The term "postmodernism" gained currency after Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in the mid-1980s.. In this particular seminar I had some of the best and the brightest, and a few of them in their innocent enthusiasm for exploring the giddy vastness of "Derrida-world" called my attention to some important misuses of the evolving Derridean canon that became necessary in their own right to deconstruct.

What my students showed me toward the end of the term is that we have misappropriated the fashion of "deconstructively" reading texts as some new kind of critical theory, which we regularly, and sometimes ruthlessly, apply to structures of meaning and authority as well as forms  of organization.  That would of course include the church, and the ongoing effort to "deconstruct" Christianity, or "churchianity", is one of the things I have in mind. 

We have developed the bad habit of regarding deconstruction as an active intervention, when in fact Derrida seems to use the word all along in the intransitive sense.  We confuse deconstruction with the Marxist or Freudian critique of ideology, when in fact something quite different is involved.  Deconstruction is not any kind of "work" itself, like a work of art, literature, philosophy, or theology.  It is always a "working through" of some thread within the text (which is what Derrida is always doing in each of his "books"), or of an indeterminate yet potentially fruitful insight. If I may paraphrase Derrida as closely as I can to one of his well-known remarks, the "work" of deconstruction is always, and has always been, at work within the work itself.  

What does this mean?  Put simply, deconstruction is not a methodology, or unmasking, of those ideas and assumptions which we hold dear, or by which a quotidian reverence for the "tradition" of theology and philosophy has kept us from seeing the the underlying truth. Deconstruction is no "hermeneutics of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur once referred to critical theory. Deconstruction, insofar as it is always "at work" within the work, amounts to what in German is called a Wirkung, one common translation of which is the English word "force".

Derrida makes a lot out of the concept of "force" in his early writings, particularly those authored in the  1960s, but not translated into English until the mid-1970s.  He also revived the phrase when he launched into the question of the "religious" around 1990.  In many respects one can derive a sense of Derrida's whole life project from a careful reading of the very early essay "Force and Signification" (force et signification), published in 1963 and contained along with other essays in English translation under the title of Writing and Difference, which appeared under a University of Chicago Press imprint in 1978.. 

"Force and Signification" is a gold mine when it comes to unearthing the "roots" of deconstruction. But what is even more interesting is the way Derrida, in "inventing" deconstruction, appears early on to be re-inventing Hegel.  Now that is not at all suprising since Derrida (like most of his generation in Paris) was considerably impacted by the neo-Marxian Alexandre Kojève's seminars on Hegel. 

Deconstruction is often considered radically un-Hegelian, which in its outworkings it of course is.   But if we inspect scrupulously what Derrida is saying in this very early article we find that deconstruction seems to be curiously birthed by, though driven in an entirely different direction from, the Hegelian dialectic itself. We can glimpse the parthenogenesis of deconstruction in the highly obscure early section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on the concept of force. We can also find it in Hegel's discussion of language in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on which Derrida comments extensively in the various essays he published in the 1960s.

I am developing this argument in the first chapter of a new book manuscript which I began this summer, and will not venture to lay it out in all its philosophical arcana and complexity on this blog.  But the upshot is that deconstruction should not be viewed as any kind of "taking apart" of the idols of language so much as it is an ongoing, mobile disclosure of the force of language.   Every moment of deconstruction is a force-event, a reading of Derrida of course that puts him closer to Deleuze than we might be accustomed to acknowledging.  

Kandinsky and the Force of Art

But the purpose of this post is not to pursue some highly technical roadmap for revisionism regarding Derrida.  I have realized that something even more significant might be afoot in the Hegelian/Derridean/Deleuzean concept of force after reading of the French philosopher Michel Henry's  Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, just recently translated, though it was published in French much earlier.

I acquired an interest in Kandinsky's art, and theories of art, long ago.  Kandinsky, by the way, was the artist who not only set in motion the imperatives of so much of modern art, but whose radical "abstractionism" was aimed at painting the power of creativity itself.  According to Henry, in Kandinsky "'abstract' no longer refers to what is derived from the world at the end of a process of simplification or complication or at the end of the history of modern painting: instead, it refers to what was prior to the world and does not need the world in order to exist." (p. 16)  According to Kandinsky, the painter paints art's "inner necessity". 

Kandinsky's well-known On the Spiritual in Art, which came out on the eve of the First World War, lays out the theory of painting according to the composition principles of inner necessity. The representational and reflective character of the painting, which compels us to see the visible world as it is, or as we have so far missed seeing it, must give way to the invisible force of the painting per se. 

According to Henry, Kandinsky's radical abstractionism regretably failed to outlive him.  So-called "abstraction" in modern and post-modern painting does not really focus on the inner necessity of the painting, but flits around the myriad pragmatic, programmatic, ideological, material, and compositional problems the artist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has encountered - the so-called "painterly" challenges.  Even if it is neither representational or figurative, art remains "pictorial", Henry tells us. 

Kandinsky, however, wanted painting to "disclose the pictoriality" of the picture, as Henry expresses it, in its pure and dynamic interiority.  Kandinsky was a theosophist, influenced by the writings of the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, as were many avante-garde artists at the turn of the century and up through World War II.  Yet his project for art has stunning implications for Christian theological thinking today, especially after Derrida. It also has outsize consequences for Christian spirituality in the arts, though I like many others are reluctant to talk about "Christian art" as a whole, since the locution is really quite vapid and often connotes nothing more than the fact that certain styles, subject matters, and aesthetic methodologies find a ready audience among people who consider themselves Christians (Unfortunately, such an audience often is drawn to the uninspired, the hackneyed, or the downright kitschy).

What perhaps would a new Christian abstractionism look like?  Or at least a Christian "abstract expressionism" (since Kandinsky's abstractionism and Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism follow similar logic of the force of the painting on to the canvas)? 

In the Derrida seminar one of my students, who was an art history and philosophy double major, asked me why "deconstructionism" seemed so unlike philosophy.  I answered that Derrida might be compared to Pollock in some ways, whose paintings were so unlike what people took to be painting.  She liked that answer, because I guess it made sense to her. Pollock called his work "gestural."  The same may be said of Derrida, who even used such a word from time to time.  The gestural is the revelation of the process by which the textual or the aesthetic "construct" comes to be, something akin perhaps to what Nietzsche really meant by Wille zur Macht, the "will to power", which manifests eminently in art.  

Many in the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s were fans of Nietzsche.  Deleuze derived his own "expressionist" philosophy from his youthful engagement with the sage of Sils Maria, which came forward in his ground-breaking 1962 book Nietzsche and Philosophy.

A Christian Abstractionism?

I have a personal muse as well that I might share with you, as I push forward this somewhat complex analysis, hopefully to culminate in a book for which I have already churned out almost 20,000 words entitled Force of God.  The tentative title of the book, as an aside, takes off from Derrida's seminal essay "Force of Law," which inaugurated in many respects his so-called "religious turn." The muse is my own wife Sunny Raschke, an artist of considerable gifts who revived a long dormant professional art career about five years ago after a hiatus of several decades.

Sunny has taught me to "see" the inner necessity of what might be termed the "force of Christ" in the creative expression of a painting.  The one shown here, entitled Origin I, is currently showing in a gallery in Denison, Texas.  The painting is actually three-dimensional with a kind of relief map effect that can be achieved through the use of a novel fabric hardener, invented in the Netherlands and known as Paverpol®.  The cross-like, "gestural" form in the center of the painting was inspired by the Louis Giglio YouTube message on the protein molecule "laminin", which holds the structures of life together. 

One is reminded of the opening hymn of Colossians, where Christ is proclaimed as "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together". (Col. 1:15-17).  The force of creation is expressed in the "image" of Christ, which "holds all things together", serves to connect the myriad puzzle pieces that are singular human lives as well as the quest for God, the Infinite Origin himself, overflowing the boundaries of "two-dimensional" sight, thinking, and imagination.

Derrida discerned the messianic, the avenir, the "to come", of divine justice in the "force of law."  Can we discern the truly "originary", the protological, which is also the eschatological, the true "alpha and omega", in the force of art?  Derrida suggests early on that there is a force of art in the sense of a "force of truth" in his work of 1978 The Truth in Painting. 

In The Truth in Painting Derrida does his own deconstructive reading of Heidegger's famous essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," which binds aesthetics to ontology rather than to the "responsibility" (Derrida's term) of the artist to the force that urges him, or her, into expressive action.  For Derrida, the religious is the responsible response to the force of God in our lives, the force of response we name the "force of faith."  That is one way which we can cogently read Derrida's The Gift of Death, which serves as a memorial re-reading of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In both religion and art we confront the Kierkegaardian/Derridean "secret" of the faith response, the "inner necessity" that harbors a subtle working of what is both creative and a redemptive force - Geist, the Spirit! 

As the French novelist Andre Gide once wrote, "art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."  That perhaps is "deconstruction in a nutshell."

Notes on Paintings. (1) Top: Wassily Kandinsky, On White 2. (2)   Middle: Jackson Pollock, The Key. (3) Sunny Raschke, Origins 1.

Postmodern Calvinism? Another Call for Papers

Conference and Call for papers: “Calvinism for the 21st Century”

Dordt College, Sioux Center, IA
April 8-10  2010

In the context of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth there has been much reflection upon the historical, cultural, and theological significance of Calvinism.  With this reflection as a backdrop, Dordt College will hold a conference in April 2010 that seeks to address the pressing issues facing the Christian community living in the 21st century.  More specifically, this conference will explore how Calvinism provides an important paradigm for a Christian engagement of such issues. 

Call for Papers

Papers are invited from across the disciplines that provide a Calvinist / neo-Calvinist engagement of the significant issues, movements, or systems of thought facing the Christian community or the broader culture at the beginning of the 21st century.  We invite papers that address topics within specific disciplines, as well as papers dealing with broad cultural issues that cross the disciplines.
Paper proposals of 1-2 pages which include 150 word abstracts should be sent by email to jlief@dordt.edu no later than October 15, 2009.  Notification of acceptance will be made by December 15, 2009.  Additional information is available at www.dordt.edu/andreascenter

On the Horizon: God in the Gallery Symposium

Beginning on July 13th, we are set to have a new book symposium on God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, by Daniel A. Siedell, which was released in October of last year.  Here is the book description:

Unfortunately, within certain Christian communities, art is often viewed with skepticism, if not disdain. Art historian, critic, and curator Daniel Siedell presents a different perspective in God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. The latest book in the Cultural Exegesis series, God in the Gallery is a welcome addition to the scant volumes that cover an evangelical reflection on the arts and the aesthetic life. Siedell ultimately contends that art is not antithetical or hostile to Christianity. Instead, it's in dialogue with it as well as a gift as opposed to a threat to faith. The author extracts insights about worldviews from thinkers ranging from Francis Schaeffer to David Naugle. Furthermore, he constructs a framework for interpreting modern art "in Christ." Siedell also examines the role of visual art in worship and Christian experience. The book is enhanced with images from such artists as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Enrique Martinez Celaya, and others.

Here is the schedule of engagements, forays, and excursions into Siedell's book:

July 13 - Ch. 1, "Overture"
     Introduction by Jamie Smith

July 20 - Ch. 2, "A History of Modern Art"
     engagement by  Matt Milliner

July 27 - Ch. 3, "Enrique Martinez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief"
     engagement by  Bruce Ellis Benson

Aug 03 - Ch. 4, "Embodying Transcendence: Material Spirituality in Contemporary Art"
     engagement by  Jason Hesiak

Aug 10 - Ch. 5, "Art Criticism"
     engagement by  Dayton Castleman

Aug 17 - Ch. 6, "Art, Liturgy, and the Church"
     engagement by  Kevin Hamilton

Please read along with us and join in the conversation! See you then.

Call for Papers: "Christian Philosophers as Public Intellectuals"

Central Regional Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers
Thinking in Public: Christian Philosophers as Public Intellectuals

April 29-May 1, 2010
Prince Conference Center at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI

Keynote speakers:
Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago
Matthew Halteman, Calvin College

Philosophers have often played a role as public intellectuals and social critics, reaching beyond the guild to speak to wider sectors of society.  While the philosophical academy is an important “public,” philosophical research can also serve a wider public.  The past century provides a plethora of examples of philosophers who have engaged in cultural conversations as public intellectuals: from Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt to Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor.  We find philosophers writing not just for Mind and Nous but also the New York Review of Books and The National Review.
    This concern for other “publics” is both amplified and specified for Christian philosophers.  As Alvin Plantinga observed in his inaugural address, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Christian philosophers “are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community.”  This impinges not only on the questions we ask, but the audiences we address.  As Plantinga concludes, “The Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God.” 
    This conference encourages Christian philosophers to re-value the importance of “public intellectual work”—both for the wider society as well as the more specific “public” of the church.  Our keynote speakers provide examples of such work.  Jean Bethke Elshtain is a widely-cited commentator on contemporary politics, including issues of war and justice.  Matthew Halteman is an emerging expert on issues of animal ethics and has written an important booklet for the Humane Society of the United States. 

CALL FOR PAPERS:

While the Central Region of the Society of Christian Philosophers welcomes papers on any topic of interest to Christian philosophers, for the 2010 meeting we especially encourage papers that intersect with the theme of “Christian philosophers as public intellectuals.” Papers should be of such length as to be presentable in 30 minutes or less. We will also entertain proposals for panel sessions involving up to three panelists with a respondent.  Proposals for panels should include an overview of the theme of the panel and a brief summary of each panelist’s contribution. All submissions should be suitable for blind review, and include a 150-word abstract containing the author’s name and affiliation as he or she would like it to appear on the program. 

Electronic submissions are preferred, and should be sent to seminars@calvin.edu.  The deadline is January 8, 2010.  Notification of acceptance  will be sent by February 5, 2010.

[Image: Ensor, Christ's Entry into Brussels, 1888]

Matter '09: A Creative Theology Event

Matter ’09: A Creative Theology Event

Date: September 17-19, 2009
Location: Seminary of the Southwest – Austin, TX

Matter ’09 seeks to create a space for meaningful conversation between working artists, theologians, philosophers, theorists, and anyone else interested in the vital intersection of faith and the arts.

Participate in creative liturgies. Engage with keynote presentations by Peter Rollins. Matter ‘09 also features panel discussions, diverse artist and scholar presentations, artists’ exhibitions, theatrical performances, and much more.

CALL FOR PAPERS & ARTWORK

Smith @ Hope: On Two Postmodernisms

Just FYI for those in west Michigan, I'll be giving at talk next week at the Hope College Philosophy Department.  This will be an informal lecture meant to be accessible to undergraduates.  Here's the info:

Continental Philosophy of Religion: Mapping Two Postmodernisms
James K.A. Smith
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
4pm, Maas Conference Room

Abstract:

Over the past decade we have seen the emergence of "continental philosophy of religion" as a growing conversation in North American philosophy. Often associated with "postmodernism," this field considers faith and religion by drawing on the resources of French and German philosophy as articulated in figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, and others. And these conversations have begun to "trickle down" into practice in, for example, conversations associated with the "emerging" church. In this talk, we'll provide a map of how postmodern sources provide a helpful lens for thinking about faith. We'll also critically consider two options or schools of thought: the "deconstructive" school of John D. Caputo and an alternative, "incarnational" model associated with Radical Orthodoxy.

Conference and Call for Papers: "Towards a Philosophy of Life"

CALL FOR PAPERS
An international conference in continental philosophy of religion

Towards a Philosophy of Life:
Reflections on the Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy of Religion

Date: Friday 26th – Sunday 28th June, 2009
Venue: Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

“The question whether it is still possible to live is the form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently today.”  Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, 112.

Traditionally, a common conception of philosophy has been as a melete thanatou or ‘meditation upon death’.  However, in recent years it is the significance of the concept of ‘life’ which has begun to receive increasing attention in contemporary European philosophy.  Indeed, writing in the wake of the brutalization of life in the death camps of Auschwitz, Adorno poses a central question for current philosophical debate on life, namely, ‘How might life live?’  The aim of this conference is to address this question and in doing so assess recent philosophies of life.  In particular, the conference seeks to explore metaphysical, phenomenological, ethical and religious underpinnings of philosophies of life, especially in light of the emergence of ‘continental philosophy of religion’.  By enquiring into conceptions of life in contemporary philosophical and religious thought, this conference also aims to reconsider the key project of ancient philosophy: the teaching of the good life.

Keynote speakers:
Dr. Pamela Sue Anderson (The University of Oxford)
Professor John D. Caputo (Syracuse University)
Professor Don Cupitt (The University of Cambridge)
Professor Jean-Yves Lacoste (Institut Catholique, Paris)
Professor John Milbank (The University of Nottingham)

Abstracts (no more than 400 words) are invited on a broad range of themes including:
•    The concept of life in vitalism and philosophies of immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Henry, Alain Badiou, etc)
•    Life, power and politics (especially Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben)
•    Alterity, gift and life: deconstruction and phenomenology
•    Rethinking life in light of the body, natality and sexual difference: feminist philosophy of religion and feminist theology
•    Psychoanalysis (life, death and desire)
•    Theologies of life (creation, incarnation, sacrament and grace)

We expect to publish in an edited book a selection of papers from the conference proceedings.   To submit an abstract (deadline: Friday 17 April, 2009), or for further information please email Dr. Patrice Haynes at haynesp@hope.ac.uk.

Conference organisers: Dr. Patrice Haynes, Dr. Steven Shakespeare and Dr. Charlie Blake at Liverpool Hope University

Nada Dada - Pete Rollins and The Iconics of "Failure"

This week's buzz on the hip Christian blogs are basically two events in, I think, the following order of importance - (a) the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States (b) the American tour of Irish "ikonic" neo-Derridean phenomenologist cum emergent pastor phenomenon Pete Rollins.  If, unlike this old horse of many different colors, you happen to be under 30 and qualify as what the demographers have dubbed as a "millennial," this was indeed your week.  This was your time, as the saying goes, and you had a lot to do with bringing it about.  I myself watched a lot and wondered even more.   Maybe that's why God scheduled things so I would just barely miss everything, although of course I could always watch it on CNN (in the first instance) or read about it all on the blogs (in the second instance). 

As it turned out, I got into Chicago for the American Academy of Religion meeting a few hours too late to hear Jack Caputo and Rollins start up a whole new conversation in the ongoing pomo conversation.  Rollins, in case you're not completely familiar with him, has taken the former's Derridean prayers and tears and turned them into the hottest new style of "post-Christian" Christian teaching, preaching, and Existenz since maybe Thomas Merton.  I know, I know, who's Merton?  All I can say is "google 'im."   Andrew Jones really likes him, and Andrew Jones really likes me, and I really like Andrew Jones, so I guess I can really say I really like Pete Rollins, though I've never met him and I didn't get to hear him.  And I'm going to also be a day late in being Dallas when he comes to Dallas this week, which is where I live, but I won't be there, because I'll be teaching philosophy and religion in Denver, where I do my work, even though I don't live there, though of course I once did live there .  Hey, I think I'm getting it down.  I quote Rollins on the front end of his homepage:  "We must avoid confusion between remaining silent and saying nothing. For while the former is passive the latter is active. By saying nothing we endeavour to speak of that which manifests in our world as a no-thing, as an absolute mystery which infuses our world with light and life." 

Say nothing and carry a big shtick.   That the no, not, nothing of Derridean apophaticism that's been on the scene since Derrida authored On the Name two decades ago and it was through a reputedly (not true, though) "atheistic" deconstructionist French philosopher that a generation rediscovered negative theology and Buddhism.  Christian Buddhism.  That was Merton's shtick, and he carried it well during the Vietnam era.   Merton was a trappist monk,  theologian,  and scholar of comparative religions with a special interest in Buddhism.  He found the profound meaning of not saying anything, or saying no-thing,  from the study of Buddhist meditation and the ancient Madhyamika philosophy of South Asia rather than any deconstructive readings of Medieval Christian thinkers, or taking Marion "to church", as Rollins does.

Oh, yea, about Obama. I don't know anybody who's not excited, although there's a lot not to be excited about, such as the world depression into which all the nations are currently spiraling.   The first thing Obama said in his post-election public statement was that we had to lower expectations.  I guess he meant all that "messianic" stuff which he himself didn't really seek to promote but now had to deal with.  Messianism without a messiah.  Sort of like religion without religion.  Or God without God.  You get the picture.  Not!  Welcome to the new millennium.  By the way, I also missed Obama's Grant Park speech by less than a day.  The AAR was over the day before election day and I couldn't change my plane ticket, unlike someone else I knew who didn't have to teach on Tuesday night in Denver and had a non-refundable fare paid by the university.  I keep missing all the important events, even though when 9/11 happened I could say proudly, "I was always there".  September 11 is my birthday, even though before 2001 it was one of the most inconsequential days on the planet.  Call it living "in not quite such a time as this."

When I talked last week to my young, millennial friend who is studying in Boston all things emergent along with all things Continental and philosophical, I was amazed, however, that he never once mentioned the election of Obama.  He was excited, however, about the American tour of Pete Rollins.   I think he was rather disappointed when I had to inform him that I missed him in Chicago, and that I would again miss him in Dallas, since he perhaps was hoping to experience him through my experiencing him and thus commenting on him.  The phenomenology of Pete Rollins who urges us to say nothing!

What does my young friend saying nothing about Obama but all the while saying a lot about the non-American post-Christian non-theological Continental philosopher who wants us to say nothing at all ("actively," he emphasizes) say about what we all are saying these days?   Post-phenomenological tongue-twisters, anyone?   Rollins' most important book, by the way, is How (Not) To Speak of God.  It was published about two years ago and has been both praised and damned - praised by Andrew of course for challenging us, which it does, and damned by others for engaging in all dat damned Derridean deconstructive de-speaking, which they claim just says nothing.  Of course, that's exactly the point.   

Unlike Brian McClaren who has double-digit names for his "generous orthodoxy" (I won't rehearse here all his "Why I Am a...Christian" sobriquets that subtitle his book ), Rollins has only five modifiers:  "iconic"," apocalyptic", "heretical", "emerging", and "failing". 

The first term really captures what I think Rollins is (not) doing, as I will explain in a minute.   The fourth is purely gestural - like postmodern.  The third is the ceremonial academic version of kitsch, or what I call "high hackneyed,"  as anybody who says anything, or nothing, that doesn't sound like it was sound-bite-engineered is deemed heretical these days, not by the authorities, who don't really care, but by us academics ourselves who like to believe everybody out there is intellectually afraid of us.  The second is  a term I myself will fight for intellectual property rights over, since I was in Berkeley in the late 1960s and was one of a trifecta that founded The Eschaton Society with the aim of bringing down the apocalypse once and for all, as was everybody else actually in those days.  We will be celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the apocalypse next spring.  All are welcome.  The fifth is, well, about why you have to say nothing at all after all, because any attempt to speak amounts to the f-word.   As Lao-Tsu put it, "those who say do not know, and those who know do not say."  I learned that in Berkeley.

The iconics of failure.  We need to develop a sense of where all this not-talking is headed, because sometimes it seems that Rollins' appropriation of the Derridist strain in postmodern thought is a bit gamey.  Unfortunately, that is the case with our current infatuation with Derridean apophaticism.  As less sophisticated critics of the emergent movement have carped, there is so much emphasis on what's not right rather than what's right - less in say in Paul's idiom Christ's "righteousness".  The apophatic moment is sometimes underwhelming, because it comes across  as nothing more than simple critique.  Critique qua critique can get boring after a while.  There is a tendency to stand back, to weave in and out of predicating because "we don't want to sound like those worn-out Christian proclamationists, those heavy-handed gospel-plumpers.   So we say nothing.  Our negative word-space, our language sous erature, is not a pregnant silence but a barren one. 

That has become the fate of the apophatic for the most part in the academy.  It is not not-saying, but having nothing to say.  I hope that Rollins' exposure to the US during this Obama-moment will be far more meaningful.   In reality, his "silence" is,  as I understand those who've taken part in his performance, or what he calls "transformance," art, rather than listen to him theologize,  in Ireland is breathtaking.   I quote from the self-definition of what he does on one of his websites.    "Inhabiting a space on the outer edges of religious life, we are a Belfast-based collective who offer anarchic experiments in transformance art. Challenging the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith our main gathering employs a cocktail of live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection in an attempt to open up the possibility of a theodramatic event."  

Rollins does not derive the strange trope of the "theodramatic" from either Caputo or Derrida but from Marion.  But it is playful Marion, joyful Marion (is that an oxymoron?), a God-without-being that is more a Nietzschean, Zarathustrean becoming, the chaos/creativity that gives birth to a dancing star.  One does not need to say anything when one dances instead.  Deconstruction is the elision of the concept.   The dance - Nietzsche's Fröhliche Wisseschaft - is the liberation of the sign.  Worship amounts to what Rollins terms "iconics."  Here we have to dig back into Marion to think Marion, as Heidegger might say, that Marion himself could not think. 

Consider Marion's analysis of the icon.   The icon is the visible "sign" as opposed to the "idol," which is the visible representation.  The idol entices the noetic gaze, arrests it, and encloses the infinity of the divine within a visible framework, similar to Heidegger's Gestell, that cannot penetrate any further.  The icon, in contrast, allows the divine to "saturate" the visible.  The icon allows the gaze to roam across the boundless spaces of the unpresentable.  It defies re-presentation.  The idol is an image/concept.  The icon constitutes an image/sign.  Thus Marion's approach amounts to what we might term a pure semiotics of the visible.  It is the somewhat loose architecture for an explication of what the painter Wassily Kandinsky, the theoretician of the "modernist" aesthetic which prefigures a postmodernist semiology, dubbed the "spiritual in art."   

The noetics of iconicity, as I have argued in my admittedly difficult earlier book Fire and Roses, can ultimately be discerned not in the chains of signifying discursivity and webworks of intertextuality that require a yes/no, a saying/not saying, but in moments of performance.   God is disclosed not in the Not, but in the event we call incarnational.  Can there be nothing more "postmodern" and "performative" than the Incarnation?  We do not speak silence so much as we ourselves live and "incarnate" in our bodies and our signifying praxis the sign of signs that is the logos/sarx   that can only be called a "theosemiophany."  Sometimes we offer up our theology by dancing to loud music. 

That goes beyond even what Rollins terms "failure."  Rollins illustrates failure as a kind of theosemiophany in his parable of the accused person who does not convince a court to convict him because of his Christian "convictions."  "In a world where following Christ is decreed to be a subversive and illegal activity you have been accused of being a believer, arrested and dragged before a court," Rollins begins.  All the evidence is presented.  The accused has been to church, done good things, expounded in terminably the reasons one should be a Christian, a Christian adherent, a "convinced" Christian.  But the judge court itself not convinced.   Much to the shock of the defendant, who was preparing himself for martyrdom perhaps, the court acquits him with these reasons:  "we have no interest in such armchair artists who spend their time creating images of a better world. We exist only for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christ-like endeavor to create it. So, until you live as Christ and his followers, until you challenge this system and become a thorn in our side, until you die to yourself and offer your body to the flames, until then my friend, you are no enemy of ours."  The iconics of failure is about disclosing the emptiness - indeed the nothingness - of convinced posturing, of hard-hitting evangelical apologetics, of orthodoxy-pushing.  It is the revelation of such failure, such as when Jesus got scourged and crucified, that counts as real revelation.  I call it empty tomb eschatology, as in the original text version perhaps of the Gospel of Mark.  Where did you go?  Nowhere.  Whom did you meet?  Nobody.  What did you say?  Nothing.  But what about this?  "Be gone, I never knew you."

I appreciate profoundly the sentiment of this now pervasive anti-orthodoxy, anti-fundamentalist, anti-establishment apophaticism. But I ask: is there nothing anymore to be deconstructed?  You can only have a revelatory negation when there is a position to be negated.  That is Hegel's ongoing dialectic, not the kingdom of God.  We forget about the total surprise of Easter morning after the long Saturday, not mentioned in Scripture, of anxiety.   When the theatarical rockers of the late 1960s and early 1970s started smashing guitars and beheading babies on stage for a season, it was sensational.  But it now bores.  The day the music died in theology was when "they" discovered deconstruction as an arcane form of philosophical baby-beheading.  Derrida as dada.  Deconstructive dadaism.  Derri-dada.  Nada Dada!

I will say something that hopefully will outrage, but when all outrages have been "outed" for the sake of finding the new and improved episode of the outre and the outrageous, I am not hopeful.  Dada is dead!  How can heretics be burned when there are no inquisitors left?  It's kind of like the puzzled look of one of my students who last Wednesday was celebrating the election of Obama and the inevitable banishment not only of the metaphysical melodrama of Darth Vader Republicanism but also of the evil Christian right, the miliatary-mongering American imperial exceptionalism,  and the now-we- are- the- world-again sort of globopomo feelgoodism.   His question.  Now what?

Perhaps they'll be back.  But as we go into week 2 we realize we are in a funk.  Perhaps my young theological friend didn't mention the election because he realized it was time to move on.  But to what?  If we no longer are not saying, but just for now, is there anything left to say?  Can Christians be burned for the sake of salvation when there is nothing left to resist, or to ridicule?

I like Pete Rollins.  I like what he is trying to do with his "transformance art," though I wish he'd, as the French say, "forget Derrida."  Time to move on, or to await the judgment of the court.

After postmodernism there is one passage in the Bible - it's actually the one is the Book of Revelation - that continues to trouble me.  It's not about the gospel as non-gospel.  It's about what John the Seer isn't the spiritual always about how we see?  - calls "the eternal gospel."  But it's neither about dancing nor silence.   "Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, 'fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.'"   (Rev. 14:6-7, NIV).

Now that's transformance art! 

 

 

The Politics of Love: Syracuse Conference 3

Syracuse University will host the third "Postmodernism, Culture, and Religion" conference on the theme The Politics of Love, April 16-18, 2009.  Plenary speakers include Hent de Vries, Amy Hollywood, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Marion, Merold Westphal and the seemingly-omnipresent Slavoj Zizek.  Visit http://pcr.syr.edu/ for more information. 

CFP: Caputo @ Wesleyan Philosophical Society 2009

Heather Ross has announced that John D. Caputo will be the keynote speaker for the March 5, 2009 meeting of the Wesleyan Philosophical Society in Anderson, IN.  Here are the details:

Call for Papers

“I More Than the Others:”
A Response to Evil and Suffering

Location: Anderson University, Anderson, In.
Conference Date:  March 5, 2009

Proposal Due Date:  October 1, 2008

This conference will seek to address several of the multi-faceted issues that stem from the conditions of evil and suffering in our world.  First Vice-President, Heather K. Ross and the Wesleyan Philosophical Society (WPS) now issue a Call for Papers for the 2009 annual conference. The conference will be held March 5, 2009 on the campus of Anderson University, in Anderson, Indiana. The Wesleyan Philosophical Society welcomes any proposals related to the following topics or the conference theme in general.  We also encourage submission of multi-disciplined papers including, but not limited to, suffering or evil in film, media and literature, art and politics, bio-ethics, gender studies, economics or anthropology.  We will consider submissions on other subjects as well, but priority will be given to those dealing with the selected theme.

• What is the relationship, if any, between evil and suffering, and structures of power?
• What is the role for Philosophy, per se, in addressing “the problem of evil?”
• How does one speak of responsibility for evil?
• How does one address poverty, sickness and excessive wealth in terms of suffering and evil?
• What is the relationship of politics to the question of evil?
• Can one adequately respond to the issues of suffering and evil without recourse to theological matters such as sin and judgment?
• What role, if any, does God play in matters of suffering and evil?
• Is the misuse of environmental resources evil?
• What responsibility does one have for evil committed by governmental violence such as, torture, war, “ethnic cleansing,” capital punishment, etc.?
• To what degree does language determine our concepts of evil and suffering?
• How does the fear of evil inform our ethical response to evil?
• Are there gender implications for violence and suffering?
• How has colonialism and imperialism shaped the questions of systemic evil?

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 1, 2008. 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 Anderson University, March 5-7, 2009.