Gilles Deleuze and the “GloboChrist” - Christianity Goes GloboPomo

WARNING: The following post contains a certain amount of technical “postmodernist” language that may be challenging to certain audiences.  Readers are advised to exercise philosophical and theological discretion.   But, hey, it's cool to bend your mind a little bit.

The globopomo twist in the postmodern turn

The “postmodern turn”, as pundits have termed the shift in philosophy, theology, and Western culture at large, has now taken a twist of its own.   Call it the turn from the “postmodern” with a distinctly Western face to the postmodern as a global phenomenon – or  globopomo.

Ever since the collapse of Communism more than fifteen years ago and the burgeoning of a planetary market economy, “globalization” has become something of a household utterance.   The word “globalization” has acquired some of the same polarizing implications as “postmodernism” itself.   Many ordinary folk as well as intellectuals, lacking any secure grasp of what “globalization” actually means, have strong views about it.  Just as the expression “postmodernism” to this day is apt to set off alarm bells among religious reactionaries, so “globalization” is likely to rouse the ire of religious liberals, who tend to associate the expression with an unrestrained expansion of stateless capitalism and the projection of a militaristic foreign policy by the Western powers around the world. 

But globalization in its countless guises is neither a moral nor a political choice that nations and transnational agents would be obliged to make, even if they could make it.   Globalization has been gathering steam since the outset of human history, and only now are we compelled to theorize or worry about it, insofar as it is now happening too fast for us to pay only casual attention to it. The social, cultural, and conceptual trajectories of the last half century, which gradually came to be known as “postmodernity”, are now visible everywhere, and their impact is overwhelming.  The “modern” was invented by Europeans and Americans, who starting in the sixteenth century cobbled together a radically new “epistemology” based on inductive logic and experimental science that was far more suitable than either the classical or Medieval world views to their rising merchant and industrial empires.   But the “postmodern” is a different kettle of fish.

Surfacing during the 1960s at a time of profound disenchantment with those empires’ legacies, “postmodernism” has come to be associated with either a shiny new vision of the West, or the decline of the West, depending on one’s prejudices.  But while the West was mired for a while in an ideological mid-life crisis, the rest of the world began “Westernizing” at an astonishing pace.   This movement involving Westernization apart from the West is what “globalization” really signifies.  And while an acceleration in commerce and capital flows along with the relentless integration of what were formerly regional economies has been the critical propellant of this process, globalization in the long haul must be viewed as the outcome of three other distinct forces – pop culture, electronic communications, and the power of religion.

Derrida’s Prophecy

The interaction of these three powerful forces in advancing globalization has been only dimly glimpsed by even the most sophisticated of “postmodern” theorists.   Philosophers and theologians are only beginning to confront the fact that globalization is not a “problem” or a “special topic”, but the very context for all future thought.    It was Jacques Derrida, Mr. Postmodernism himself, who in the last decade of his life and career, recognized what was suddenly looming above the horizon.  In his very difficult and convoluted, but “prophetic”, essay Faith and Knowledge published in the mid-1990s, Derrida made it clear that the challenge was no longer “deconstructing” the texts and cerebral fixities of the West, but preparing the West for the end of the West as we know it.  Just as Europe and Islamic civilization could not have emerged without the “Latinization” of the transalpine “barbarian” cultures and the ancient Near East respectively, so the dawning planetary civilization would be inconceivable without what Derrida termed “globo-techno-Latinization” – in other words, Westernization that has outstripped the West overall.

Derrida also realized that the key to globo-techno-Latinization was what he dubbed the “return of religion.”  Derrida deployed this phrase in almost the exact same way as Freud talked about the “return of the repressed.”   The force of religion, and of religious motivation, was like a seemingly benign tropical depression which over the open waters of globalized communications and finance would suddenly explode into a full-blown hurricane.   On September 11, 2001 Derrida’s “prophecy” was fulfilled.  Religion, as was true of “justice” for Derrida, by its own dynamism was inherently “messianic”, and therefore it had to be construed as something “undeconstructible.”  Moreoever, although Derrida did not say it precisely this way, it could also be regarded as the very force of deconstruction itself.

But Derrida failed to understand that return of religion only would make sense if it were the outcome of a “play of forces” from which globalization itself emanates.  Although the word has amassed far more august connotations than are deserved, “deconstruction” is for the most part nothing more than a a non-metaphysical and non-linear way of reading texts as well as a philosophical approach to language and meaning that derives the “sense” of a statement from re-reading and re-interpreting a passage within a general syntax, or context..  This procedure approximates the method and aims of classical rabbinic commentary on the Torah, with which Derrida identified himself.  Moreover, deconstruction applies to those literary remains that have been written down and codified as wisdom or knowledge.  It has virtually nothing to say about what is going on in the world at large, about transformations in peoples and cultures, about vast epochs and human history.

Transcendental Empiricism

The philosophical figure whom globalization theorists are increasingly calling upon to map the terra incognita of our globo-pomo era is Gilles Deleuze.  A contemporary and  colleague of Derrida in their early years, Deleuze never had the kind of showy “stage presence” that the former relied upon to become an academic celebrity, particularly in the English-speaking world.  Derrida was a type of intellectual troubadour, a wandering “minstrel” who charmed with his complex but often personal and polyphonic technique of communication.  Deleuze was the quintessential university professor.  Although his collaboration with the flashy psychoanalyst Felix Guattari gave him a high public visibility that would have otherwise been lacking because of his dense philosophical style, Deleuze only for a time stepped outside his closeted professional environment, not to mention his comfortable Parisian surroundings.  Although he was in love with American literature and much of Americana , he only once journeyed to the United States.

Deleuze, however, left a rich as well as daunting legacy that is only now in the Anglo-American philosophical sphere beginning to be mined. Even more than Derrida, Deleuze was a genius and a polymath who sought to revolutionize thinking itself, to delineate what he himself dubbed a “new image of thought.”   Deleuze was as much a “cultural theorist” as  he was a philosopher.  He was certainly not a “theologian” in any remote insinuation of the term, and he would have been appalled if anyone had tried to slap that label on him.  Deleuze’s“God”, like that of Spinoza who strongly influenced him, was an “immanent” one,” a trope for a deeply hidden reserve of limitless signification and surprise with what he dubbed not the cosmos, but the chaosmos.  Deleuze was talking of what we now term “chaos theory,” or complexity theory, before that became a familiar scientific notion. 

Deleuze envisioned the world as a “plane of immanence” and all phenomena as multi-dimensional disturbances along the surface of that plane, the reasons for and ultimate causes of which we have little clue. Strictly speaking, we live in “flatland.” Deleuze had no patience for “transcendent” – that is, metaphysical – explanations that the mind instinctively inserts when it is unable to peer into the murky currents of life. When it comes to giving some account of everything we know, we are left with nothing more than a rather confused sense that there are threads of significance in the weave of experience. To isolate and identify those threads is the purpose of philosophy, which can never get beyond, as Kant once reminded us, beyond experience.   Deleuze, therefore, called his “method” of philosophy – rather opaquely – a “transcendental empiricism.”

"It” happens

At a superficial level Deleuze sounds a little like Alfred North Whitehead, whom he admired, and it would be possible, though totally impertinent and inappropriate, to elicit some vague sort of “process theology” from his work. What makes Deleuze radically different – and why we cannot in any way affiliate him with so-called “process thinkers” - is that he understood such seductive locutions as “event” or “emergence” as terms suggesting transitory configurations of signs rather than as referring to something substantial and real in themselves.   Meaning resides in disruptions and disjunctions rather than in those intimations of continuity that are naturally pleasing and assuring to us. We cannot find “ultimate” meaning in some order of things that is either “above” (theism) or “below” (atheism).    If there is any bumper sticker sort of caption that might sum up what Deleuze is driving at, it would be, simply put, it happens.   But the “it” is not an impersonal or mechanical agency – a Deus ex machina, as the Greeks called it - that reduces everything to fate.  Nor is it merely a codeword for the random and capricious.  The “it” serves as an invitation to explore whatever brought about this singular event of which we are now aware in the first place.

Every event, for Deleuze, is a divergent series, a fork in the road of understanding that up until that point was familiar and well-travelled.   God is not the great historical puppet master, the “invisible” hand that manipulates events, as theologians have assumed all along.  “God is a lobster,” Deleuze writes at the opening of A Thousand Plateaus with a turn of phrase which seems at once cryptic and shocking until one fathoms what he is actually saying.  In the same way that a lobster crawls along the ocean floor, pushes itself, and sifts sediment with both claws simultaneously, so “events” in a metaphorical manner of speaking can be attributed to the “divine” glimpsed within what Deleuze calls the “double articulation” of diverging processes of signification.  What we mean by “God” is what seems to comes forward after we have performed countless of these double articulations.  “It” happens, but God eventuates.  Where the “carnal mind” dismisses what happens as mere destiny, faith sees “holes” in the seemingly seamless web of fate and can proclaim, like Jacob at Bethel. “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it." (Gen. 28:16).  When Jesus in the gospels says let your “yea be your yea” and “your nay be your nay”, he is making a similar point.  If we mix up our yeas and nays with a lot of maybes, and do not stare at the contradictions of life – the “divergent series” – we miss God.

The Christ Event and the Global “Event Horizon”

God is not, as Derrida indicated, the “transcendental signified” that must somehow be “deconstructed” by philosophy, or theology.  God is the vanishing point – what Deleuze calls the “line of flight” – or the point at which all articulations of signs diverge.  As we might say in the parlance of the physics of black holes, God is the “event horizon”.   It is in the midst of events, or in media res, where the “mystery” of God is most evident. Derrida himself lauded Deleuze as the “philosopher of the event.”

What does all of the above have to do with globalization, or at least with faith today in our globopomo situation?    Furthermore, what does “it” have to do with the quest for Christian faith today, for a postmodern Christian faith.   Without going into much detail because of space limitations in this essay, one can say that globalization is the universal process that is now sweeping all of us and our various “civilizations” away.  Globalization means that all our religious identities have in Deleuze’s language been “deterritorialized,” stripped by the surging tides of history itself of all concrete and cultural locality and torn from their conceptual moorings.  What deconstruction is for texts, deterritorialization is for peoples and faiths.  Globalization is the great “deconstructor” of our identities except our one, true identity – our identity in Christ.  According to the French postmodern philosopher Alain Badiou, ex-Maoist and disciple of Deleuze who “discovered” Christianity through his reading of St. Paul, Christ is the “pure event”.   He is the “it” that has happened once and for all, the event that draws all events on a planetary scale toward him. 

In my forthcoming book GloboChrist I explore the meaning of this event for the world that is on its way,  that is “to come” (avenir in Derrida’s idiom).  I examine how the “deterritorialization” of Christianity, once a historically “sited”, or localized, largely Western phenomenon, is now sweeping us in the direction of the eschatological “event horizon” named the GloboChrist.  The decline and disillusionment of the Christian West in the late modern era has been but a prelude to a vast Christian “revival” in the postcolonial world, or in what is conventionally called the “global south”.  Historian Philip Jenkins in his increasingly influential book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity ( Oxford , 2002) documents extensively what he calls the “myth of Western Christianity”. (See the lengthy conversation with Jenkins in a forum of the Pew Charitable Trust at http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=145).  Only during the era of “modern” European ascendancy was Christianity ever decidedly Western, Jenkins argues.  Now that Europe’s glory days are over, Christianity is returning to its roots as a “non-Western” faith.  Yet at the same time it has been “indigenized” in just about every ethnic and cultural particularity popping up on the planet.  This trend demonstrates the current saying that “the global is always local,” while it illustrates Deleuze’s dictum that the event is apprehended at the boundary of a singularity – in this case, the collapse of Enlightenment-based “universal” principles and values into that yet unnamed eventuality that remains avenir, that is “Christ for the nations.”   

The singularity of the past, present, and coming “Christ event” that is both alpha and omega and is becoming obvious with the advent of the new global Christianity is a prospect that may unsettle “progressive” or emergent Christians as much as conservatives, who have largely turned their back on the postmodern and cast their lot with a decadent modernist orthodoxy.   The new “globoChristianity” challenges the social, political, and epistemological assumptions of Christian liberals in the West as much as it shakes the foundations of those who lean rightward.  Jenkins makes the point himself with innumerable anecdotes and illustrations.  Derridean “deconstruction” has been a useful, although frequently misused, multipurpose tool to expose conservative idolatries, especially their idolatries of the text.  But Deleuzian “deterritorialization” discloses the parochialism and conceptual limits of many habitual deconstructors, even perhaps Derrida himself.

It was Michel Foucault, the great postmodern theorist of “knowledge and power”, who predicted in the late 1970s that “the next century will be the age of Deleuze.”  We are now in the next century.  As Christians, we ignore the challenges of our age only at our own peril.

Comments

[Dominic Fox]

This is a sorry parade of solecisms, the tone of which is set from the outset by the patronizing mock-disclaimer about "challenging" language. It appears that no-one could be more "challenged", in the face of the "very difficult and convoluted" language of the philosophers whose names appear in this article, than its author.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the nomination of Jacques Derrida as "Mister Postmodernism himself". We learn later that Derrida "identified himself" with "the method and aims of classical rabbinic commentary on the Torah". Mister classical rabbinic comentator on the Torah himself! But there is at least more in Reb Derissa's texts to support this identification, as hazardous as it might appear, than there is to support the association of his name with a "postmodernism" of global deterritorialised flows, with which he certainly never "identified himself" and from which he was careful, on more than one occasion, to take his distance. Derrida's dismissal, in Spectres of Marx, of the already shopworn mondialist triumphalism of Fukuyama is exemplary here, and I recommend it to the reader disquieted by Dr Carl's evident enthusiasm for the "relentless integration" allegedly accomplished by the "planetary market".

Let us go on. Badiou, the anti-postmodernist atheist philosopher of the actual who has described the trajectory of his thought and political work as one of fidelity to "two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences" appears somehow in this article as a pomo Deleuzian "disciple" and repentant "ex-Maoist" who has lately fallen into the embraces of the cosmic Christ. (Just try getting Badiou to say that he is an "ex-Maoist"...). C'est à crever de rire...

While it is at best inaccurate to describe Badiou as a "disciple" of Deleuze, it is nevertheless true that he positions Deleuze, in various texts including Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, as an eminent metaphysical rival. In particular, I should like to draw attention to what Badiou claims is the major achievement of Deleuze's Bergsonism: the rigorous separation of Bergson's thought from the pious and sentimental Christianisation it received at the hands of Teilhard de Chardin, whose complaisant spirit wafts effulgently out of every crevice in the "postmodern globo-Christianity" here essayed.

I am far from an expert on Deleuze; but it is clear from even a cursory reading of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that there is no one "plane of immanence" (the title of A Thousand Plateaus ought perhaps to give one pause here), and no one, ultimately convergent, "line of flight". Likewise, there is no one "deterritorialisation", unbinding all worldly identities and drawing all into the light of the eschaton. The line of flight that crosses and composes a plane of immanence deterritorialises and reterritorialises in the same movement; it is an operator of virtuality, which relates the actual to the chance of its becoming. To apprehend this operator as the universal attraction of an eschatological "event horizon" is, let us put it kindly, quite some feat of the imagination.

[Carl]

Dominic,
I wonder if you would be less offended by my remarks if you had read Badiou's book Saint Paul, which heavily informs what has been written here. It is clear that Badiou, who repeatedly cites Deleuze to make his point, is quite enthralled with what he calls the "Christ event," although his revival of that talk seems to suffer an ongoing amnesia that this is largely Bultmann plus "truth procedures." You seem to think that to link Deleuze to this kind of "event talk" is merely "pious and sentimental Christianisation", but it is certainly quite the convention now among Continental philosophers. It is even the gist of Jack Caputo's book THE WEAKNESS OF GOD which has as its subtitle "A Theology of the Event", although I am going in a rather different direction here.

There is far more to Deleuze than "Anti-Oedipus". Deleuze liked to be read in "divergent" ways. I am reading him one way here, which probably is more on track that the aim, which I believe you state in your own blog, which is "to bask in the dark radiance of that void: to bathe in such necrotic toxicity as seeps from the pulsing, oily heart of its black sun. Onwards to extinction!"

The event always has lobster-like properties.

[joseph mailander]

I have read Deleuze seemingly for centuries, but only finished Pure Immanence just this week. I was amazed to find how much lux aeterna it let in, and how much of Spinoza's substance is in the opening chapter.

I think Deleuze certainly knew Sartre well (it's obvious to me by how infrequently Sartre is cited) and especially Sartre's charge that consciousness is like an emptiness, a wind blowing towards objects. One object it may blow towards is God, and that is why to Deleuze God was like a lobster; consciousness is empty; the Nomad escapes, maybe from emptiness, maybe towards it; and God, external to the emptiness, scuttles the bottom of the emptiness with ragged claws, naturally deterritorializing, naturally on a line of flight exemplar par excellance.

As someone who's cautiously identified himself as a "deconstructed Catholic" for about a decade now (it means something to me, but it also invites parsing by anyone and everyone), "God is a lobster" has been an enormous spiritual gift. It's really no more unusual than a lot of the kind of thinking in The Ascent of Mt. Carmel---another book that, if I recall correctly, also makes its way into Pure Immanence.

FWIW, I think they had a useful term akin to "globo-Christ" in the first millennium: Pantocrator, the image from Byzantine art.

[Dominic Fox]

What Badiou means by "event" and what Deleuze means by "event" are not the same thing...

[Dominic Fox]

FWIW, I think they had a useful term akin to "globo-Christ" in the first millennium: Pantocrator, the image from Byzantine art

A favourite word of dear Teilhard, as it happens.

[Jaosn Hesiak]

Being an architect...and someone thoroughly annoyed with modernity's systematization of everything (rooted in the word Pan)...and considering Teilhard's apparent relation to Hegel, so far as I can tell...this "Christ Pantocrator" stuff I find fascinating. I haven't read Dominic's link from Badiou on Deleuze and the Event yet, but my suspicion is that the difference between Deleuze and Badiou bears a certain resemblance to the difference between Deleuze and the Byzantine figurative imagination.

With Badiou the "Event," or at least the Truth of it, seems to descend or fall from above...figuratively speaking. Byzantine art and iconography is organized figuratively; and the Christ Pantocrator belongs at the head of the dome of the chapel/basilica, which also happens to be, figuratively, the center of the space. For Deleuze, however, God is a lobster crawling along the bottom of the abyss (which itself sounds Bergsonian). Christ is somewhere between still buried in some hidden place in the crypt (so far as Deleuze cares, or maybe in reaction to Hegel/Lacan) and simply enjoying hanging out in the crypt because it doesn't get so darned hot down there (desire is carnal).

[Dominic Fox]

With Badiou the "Event," or at least the Truth of it, seems to descend or fall from above...figuratively speaking

I can't imagine where you'd get that idea.

[Jaosn Hesiak]

I realize that for him the truth emerges or is produced, so to speak, but I was referring to the difference between Badiou and, say...Deleuze. So far as I can tell, Badiou concentrates more on truth and how it is reinterpreted and/or reformed through events in time that crash the party that we had previously been hosting, whereas Deleuze concentrates more on interconnecting vectors of desire (from "below"). Without Badiou's "Viod" talk - the event's calling something out of nothing - you probably wouldn't hear me using this "above" talk for Badiou. As it stands, though...as I see it at least...he's turning something (the stuff of history from which events emerge) into an "objective" kind of nothing from which truths dynamically emerge.

That gets kind of complicated, though, because he himself says the exact opposite of what I just said he said, sort of. To quote Geoff on Badiou: "When Badiou speaks of the void, he is not talking of some vague, existentialist notion of angst, nor of the beyond being of God, but of the mathematical void of set theory, the null/void set from which all other sets are built."

In other words...all I'm trying to say is...for both Deleuze and Badiou, you could probably say, "the process of truth induces a subject"...but its different for Badiou and Deleuze. And I'm especially trying to note, about Badiou (to quote Geoff again): "This seizing of Truth by the thought of philosophy can also be thought of as 'subtractive', based in the thought of the void. Philosophy subtracts thought from the maze of sense, from the hold of presentation, for the Truth is never merely presented, it has no immediate presentation." (http://for-the-time-being.blogspot.com/2006/08/badiou-on-truth-and-return-of.html (same link as before))

I'm not a great authority on Badiou or Deleuze, though. And I'm an old fashioned weeney who believes in a medieval sort of essential/personal imageo dei...which colors how I think of the term "figurative" in relation to the clocktower/crypt configuration of a medieval basillica, or the abyss/void dynamic of Bergson/Deleuze/Badiou. In other words, my somewhat medieval allegiance is what leads me to say that "subtract[ing] thought from the maze of sense" has something to do with what is "above." For me, events happen along the path of a Labyrinth, not a maze. And a Labyrinth is a joint between heaven and earth, not some organless body/Void/Truth with no above or below at all in the first place.

Call me annoying for reading something into Badiou, if you want. Sorry. At least I hope you can imagine what I meant now.

[Dominic Fox]

I mean, to be a little less brusque, that I think that's simply false. The construction of a truth is an immanent procedure, a kind of diagonalisation of a situation. And Badiou's "event" doesn't simply spring into being ex nihilo, although it is rooted in what you might call the crypt of the situation (the "evental site" that a situation presents without representing, thereby indicating that there is something that is not nothing that it does not present). Badiou's event doesn't fall from the heavens; still less is it any kind of pullulating permanent fount of cosmic creativity...

[Dominic Fox]

To read something into Badiou, one would surely - in the first instance - have to have read him?

[Jaosn Hesiak]

Allrighty then Sir Achilles/the inversion of Henry Miller,

(Not)annoying I am, then. I admittedly haven't taken much of the plunge into Badiou myself, but I was aware that "Badiou's 'event' doesn't simply spring into being ex nihilo." That would be absurd. Thanks for the lesson, though. I realize I wasn't clear on that, but its a truth embedded in what is meant by "the null/void set from which all other sets are built." I guess its a trust issue.

So, I shush now. Thanks for trying graciously (without being so brusque) to save us all from perishing in untruth. The spurring along of the gadfly is different from the impressions left by being brusque.

There is always an underlying sadness latent in the passionate and glroious tragedies of heroes (which can sometimes appear as anger). Onwards then to the black sun of extinction...or to the resurrection. Or maybe more reading for us all. Who is to say.

[Carl]

What Badiou calls the "Christ event" (a term invented by Bultmann, but would be meaningless to Deleuze) is neither from "above" or "below." This controversy of immanence/transcendence is something Deleuze himself seeks to transcend. Badiou at the end of ST. PAUL names the event as "immanent exception." The Christ event is the immanent exception to all becoming, and thus for Badiou the genuine "foundation of universalism". I would tend to side with Dominic on this issue because "Pantocrator", because it suggests a metaphysical arche. Metaphysics is really "ontocracy."

I won't get into a discussion here about whether Badiou mainly uses or abuses Deleuze, because it's complicated. Just as Derrida disfigured Heidegger to advance his project of "grammatology," so Badiou disfigures Deleuze to advance his "return to Platonism," which is really a Pythagoreanism. All "disciples" distort their masters - and Badiou IS a disciple of Deleuze in this sense - in order to be released of their masters. It is what a Derridean would call the "productive misprision."

To quote from the essay by Badiou linked above, "the event must be thought as the advent of what is subtracted from experience." Badiou's "immanent exception" entails the language of mathesis, of the null set. Whether this has any real "theological" relevance, I'm not sure. Badiou's book on Paul is something Deleuze would never attempt because it fails to solve the problem of both origin and eschatology "within sense" (Badiou's terminology).

The question of eschatology, and of any Christ event, rests on the "procedure" by which one de-teleologizes eschatology. Nietzsche began the quest with the "thought" of eternal recurrence, which was Deleuze's starting point. In DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR BEING Badiou says he "broke" with Deleuze in 1994 over this very question. According to Badiou, Deleuze could never get beyond the limit-principle of the "univocity of Being," which in effect is metaphysics and not eschatology. It was in accord with this "break" that Badiou married set theory, from which he had already derived his four "truth procedures," with an emergent fascination with St. Paul.

But I think there Badiou would strangely begin to side with Jason, not in regard to Pantocrator theology - Teilhard is totally irrelevant to this discussion - but with respect to the Byzantine Pantocrator icon. Badiou's "Christ event" is a simulacrum for this icon, which itself is a simulacrum for the neo-Platonic One (not to be confused with the Deleuzian). The Christ event is the one to which we are "faithful," says Badiou.

The GloboChrist is not a "Badiouan" event, but a Deleuzian one, which I will explain later, if anyone cares.

[Dominic Fox]

It is what a Derridean would call the "productive misprision."

It is what a Bloomian would call a productive misprision. If that is indeed what it is...

I do not think that Badiou criticises Deleuze for a failure to "get beyond" the "limit-principle" of the univocity of Being, or regards this as a limit that can or should be overcome. The set-theoretic ontology laid out in Being and Event establishes nothing other than a "being" that is said in the same way of everything of which it is said. The event "is not" in a sense specific to this ontology and its axioms: it is non-well-founded, an "immanent exception" precisely because, in presenting itself, it violates the "meta-ontological" axiom of foundation. (If one wants to translate this back in the direction of theological language, it conjoins kerygma and kenosis...)

Now, here is something I wish you had acknowledged. When speaking of "the Christ event", Badiou is always speaking of the Christ event in Paul, of Paul's thinking of the evental (or the subjective triple event-fidelity-truth). The Christ event for Badiou is a simulacrum of the evental; it presents a kind of fictive schema of how the subject of a truth might appear and proceed.

Paul's Christ is paradigmatic for Badiou, but without, finally, being the real deal; the real events are those in politics, science, love and the arts, which involve material investigation of and engagement with the resources presented by an actual situation (rather than a fictive cosmology, which is where the drama of Paul's Christ event is finally played out). The event that matters is not the Christ event. (In a certain sense, this is just what the gospels themselves say). Above all, there is no one event - the event (any event whatsoever) is not the event of the One, but the transformation of a specific site and the appearance of a truth. Universal, yes; but not "global".

[Jaosn Hesiak]

FYI, Dominic, elsewhere someone referred to our previous exchange as entertaining. So we've been valuable to someone else, lol.

"This controversy of immanence/transcendence is something Deleuze himself seeks to transcend." This sounds like the lobster thing. The question, for me, becomes who really is the lobster. Quoted from Logic of Sense, Badiou's essay to which we were portaled, says: "The agonizing aspect about the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something that has just happened and something that is about to happen; never something which is happening." The agony is only present if we are the lobster...or maybe if we seek to be like the lobster through philosophical discourse. The sense in which we are the lobster in Deleuze, though, is complicated. So I shush now about that. I'm not sure about Badiou on that one, but my sense is that his "return to Platonism" doesn't really help solve the issue.

From what I gather, he means the "subtraction of thought from the maze of sense" to be very specific to the process of philsophical discourse. The events continue. But who is a philsopher? The following strikes me as a healthy statement in regards to my question of who is the lobster: "the event (any event whatsoever) is not the event of the One, but the transformation of a specific site and the appearance of a truth."

Funny that Badiou would side with me, though. I wouldn't have fancied that. You learn something new every day. Anyhow, Deleuze doesn't strike me as a neo-Platonist. But I think the question of where the "real event" occurs is why everyone was up in arms over what can seem like the re-appearance of political liberalism among the PoMo theologians discussed previously on this blog after some different posts. Genuine question, though: how does or would Badiou characterize this "fictive schema" of Paul's writings? I guess "simulacrum for this icon [of Christ Pentocrator]" would say it...but that doesnt' resolve it in my head.

And: "The GloboChrist is not a "Badiouan" event, but a Deleuzian one, which I will explain later, if anyone cares." I CARE. I would love to hear about that.

And so far as "discipleship" and "productive misprision" goes, the ancients would have called this "sacrafice." But it wouldn't have been "misprision." Too much reverence in folks back then. And Bloom was a Gnostic, which is relevant to the conversation that occured last time Carl posted here. As for where the actual event occurs, it should probably be noted that the disciples of Christ didn't have to "sacrafice" him, because to them he was a) already sacraficed, and b) actually present in his risenness. Although some folks here might debate the sense in which that's true, I suppose...if in they hold to the idea that the "event" occurs in "an impersonal transcendent field" (to quote Deleuze through Badiou's essay again).

Jason

[Jaosn Hesiak]

BTW, in that last comment there, I said: "The sense in which we are the lobster in Deleuze, though, is complicated. So I shush now about that." Part of what I meant was, if I knew more about Deleuze, I would venture to say something that presumed to have more authority behind it in that regard. In other words, from what I know about Deleuze, it seems like he's basically putting the burden upon me of being God...at least in a way that I believe that I am not. But I don't know enough about Deleuze to say that with authority.

[Dominic Fox]

Right, I think I've finished being the Badiouian asshole here. Just don't call him a "postmodernist" again...

I am grateful, incidentally, to the author(s) of the wikipedia article on "postmodern christianity" for correctly observing that "such alleged postmodern heavyweights as Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have refused to operate under a so-called postmodern rubric". The compulsion to assimilate them, malgré eux, to that rubric betrays the ideological overdetermination of the label: "postmodernism" -> unbinding of "fixed identities" -> assimilation of discrete and refractory instances of thought into the global sweep of precisely the supposed "epoch" they seek to diagnose and resist...

[Jaosn Hesiak]

For the sake of clarity, I meant to say "Protestant Liberalism" rather than "political liberalism." But that was probably obvious. Sorry for any confusion. The consequences of multi-tasking.

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

I suppose the main question that I have after reading your post and the subsequent exchange with Dominic Fox is this: what does your thesis imply for orthodox Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus?

Let me justlay my cards on the table: I don't see how the thought of Deleuze, Badiou, or Derrida, taken tel quel, can be compatible with orthodox Christology.

So I see a dilemma here: either accept Deleuze, Badiou, or Derrida tels quels---and jettison or radically refashion orthodox Christology; or maintain orthodox Christianity---without kidding ourselves about the deep incompatibility of Deleuze and co.'s thought with orthodox Christianity.

This latter option, which I think is the right one, doesn't entail refusing to learn from Deleuze and co.; it just entails that we don't think we're learning from them as authorities who determine our basic framework for thinking about reality, but as smart colleagues whom we disagree with, even as the ongoing disagreement is intellectually fruitful.

The worst of both worlds would be something like this: an attempt to have our cake and eat it too, by (selectively) using Deleuze, etc. to undermine modernity insofar as we suppose it to be inimical to Christianity, and then, in a kind of Christus ex machina move, suddenly proposing Christ as the answer without thinking through how even our selective appropriation of Deleuze, etc. might be in tension with, or even contradict, orthodox Christianity.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Geoff Holsclaw]

Badiou was mentioned only once in the post and look at the reaction.  I vow that in August we will have some posts dedicated to Badiou to help us think more clearly about him. 

Dominic, in general I agree with what you said about Badiou.  He's not Ex-Moaist, but is probably ex-Deluezian, and he doesn't theorize about the Christ Event, but rather talk about Paul (hence the title of that little book) who Badiou claims is the first to have ever unfolded Evental logic and its induction of a faithful subject.  But more on that another time. 

Carl, along with Jason, I would love to hear how "GloboChrist" is a Deluezian Event instead of a Badiouan Event.  That is very interesting and would probably help us understand where it is you are going with this. 

And secondly, you say, "Globalization means that all our religious identities have in Deleuze’s language been “deterritorialized,” stripped by the surging tides of history itself of all concrete and cultural locality and torn from their conceptual moorings...Globalization is the great “deconstructor” of our identities except our one, true identity – our identity in Christ."

Two questions: 
1) Why do you bring Christ back into the equation as our true identity when it seems that neither Delueze or Derrida would endorse this move? (this is a slight various on Adrian's question)
2) if "deterritorialization" destroys substantial identities (personal, cultural, national), what keeps this movement from being at the service, or at least appropriated by, the enormous yet insubstantial power of Capital before which everything becomes like mist?

[adrian walker]

Dear Geoff,

Your two questions are right on the money (no pun intended). Since the first one formulates mine much more concisely than I did, let me just comment briefly on the second question.

You're spot on: The notion of substance, properly understood, is a way of doing justice to the irreducible dignity and mystery of people and things. Before we reject substance altogether, then, we owe it to ourselves to realize that there is such a thing as a notion of substance rightly understood and that it's meant to protect good things.

Now, after due consideration, we may decide that we still want to get rid of substance. But without that due consideration, we're shortchanging ourselves intellectually.

Which brings me back to something I've harped on here before, which is that if you want to appropriate post-modernism intelligently, then you have to be able to get clear about the intellectual power of rival or alternative philosophical accounts, rather than just dismissing them as so many historically conditioned "-isms." Otherwise, you end up jumping on a bandwagon and flunking as a philosopher---and, however much a person may disagree with Badiou, etc., they themselves are philosophers and should be wrestled with in a philosophical way.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Jaosn Hesiak]

As comedic relief, yesterday I think it was, I was finishing up my reading of that essay by Badiou in a coffee shop...and, upon leaving, while walking outside to the parking lot, I was confronted with the image of the side of a Fed Ex truck...which consisted of some big bright letters reading: "FED EX: The World On Time." I laughed; because Badiou is, I think, talking about the moment when Fed Ex is no longer in operation.

[Jaosn Hesiak]

Oh...for the punch line. Forgot the punch line. If Fed Ex is "the world on time," then what will happen when Fed Ex is no longer in operation!? "The Event," or the end of the world? Lol.

[Carl]

Been away on a trip for three whole days as well as on the internet.

I'm trying to scan and digest here not just how to respond to this flurry of posts, but how to respond (e.g., singularly or generically or indirectly?) For the record I think given the need for economy in such a response I will proceed "intrerrogationally," meaning to respond to questions by posing further questions (something Heidegger said philosophers do instincitvely anyway).

But, first let me distill what I think are the questions here:
1) What sort of intellectual and ideological species is Badiou himself (Deleuzian, ex-Deleuzian, crypto-Deluzian, post-Deleuzian, Maoist, ex-Maoist, post-Maoist, Christian, anti-Christian, para-Christian, weird-sort-of-unconventional Christian)?
2) What kind of event is Badiou's event, and how does it diverge/converge/verge from/toward/on Deleuzian "events", or Bultmannian events, or the Bultmannian "Christ event", or to what degree is it an "evental" event?
3) To what degree does any of this matter if the context for the question is what it means to be a "Christian," or a "pomo Christian", which may or may have anything to do with the "church" (ie., "churchandpomo.typepad.com"), which may or may not presuppose some take on "orthodoxy", even though the language of Christian orthodoxy (not to be confused with radical orthodoxy, which some critics say is neither radical nor orthodox, so of like Voltaire's Holy Roman Empire) is an entirely different "regime of discourse" from pomo (e.g., neo-Platonic ouisiology versus postmodern, Heidegerrian post-ousiology)?
4) Why bring "Christ" into this mix of different discourse regimes, particularly a Deleuzian one when clearly the Vicar of Vincennes never showed an interest in "Christ talk," or even Paul talk (contra his "disciple"), though "Christians" would seem per contra to have an interest in talking about Christ at some level, and when you go down that "pure immanence" path you know you've sort of got to somehow address the Christ-as-incarnation sort of thing, even if it's a purely immanent kind of deal, even if Dr. D. didn't want to go there.
5) NOW FOR MY QUESTION: So can someone help me to understand what's the question?

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

OK---for me there are two basic questions here:

First, can you be a Derridean, or Badiouian, or Deleuzian, or whatever and still in good faith believe in Jesus Christ as incarnate Son of God, Savior, and Lord in a way that Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Maximus the Confessor, C.S. Lewis, etc. would have recognized as Christian?

Second, what is the issue that "event" (whether Badiouian or Deleuzian) is supposed to help us think through? Is it just a subtlety of post-modern scholasticism? Or is it something that, if stated apart from the jargon of the schools, people could recognize as hitting close to home? (ok, that's 3 questions in one).

Cordially,
Adrian

[Carl]

Thanks, Adrian.

I would say you can study and debate the meaning of these philosophers, take them very seriously, and "still in good faith believe in Jesus Christ as incarnate Son of God, Savior, and Lord in a way that Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Maximus the Confessor, C.S. Lewis, etc. would have recognized as Christian?" The point is not to be a Deleuzian, or a Derridean, etc? The point is to be a Christian. Augustine was a Christian first and a Platonist second. Aquinas was a a Christian first and an Aristotlean second. The interesting thing about Christian history is that faith constantly seeks understanding by appropriating the discourse of its age to raise fundamental faith-questions (not theological questions necessarily) in a different way than in the past. Remember, the church first condemned Aquinas as a heretic because they were too weirded out by his appropriation of that pagan-Arab philosopher Aristotle. We can do the same with Deleuze. We don't have to buy into everything Deleuze says about everything. Calvin appropriated the Renaissance thinkers in various ways but didn't simply trade them for his Christianity.

Second, the issue pure and simply is Christianity is a globalized world and ultimately eschatology. That's where I was going before we got sidetracked with all the debate over who Badiou really was, and what he really meant, or how he differed from Deleuze. I think Dominic wanted to challenge my philosophical credentials for whatever reason as someone who knew what I was talking about in bringing up Deleuze and Badiou, so I obliged him. But that wasn't really at all what I started out to discuss.

One of the things that honestly that really is starting to bug about much emergent pomo discourse is that it is becoming a weird kind of philosophico-theological esotericism - even a Gnosticism - with its own intellectual icons and various forms of political correctness that resembles neither the philosophical movement it adulates nor anything like "Christian theology" which it claims to be. I think someone referenced the "postmodern Christianity" entry on Wikipedia. That is a good example. Not only is it factually and historically wrong on most counts, it has a kind of inside agenda that baffles me.

[Jaosn Hesiak]

"5) NOW FOR MY QUESTION: So can someone help me to understand what's the question?"

My question is about question (3) about "ousiology." Funnily, I read that term, and thought, "What the heck does THAT mean." Went to the dictionary, and as expeted, didn't find it. Eventually found that it has to do with "essence," and decided: "That's EXACTLY what I'm concerned/asking about! My question, mainly, I suppose: how is there such a thing as a PoMo ousiology? If PoMo doesn't seek to avoid ologies in the first place (not critical to Carl's question, I don't think), it does certainly seem to avoid an ousilogy...so far as I can gather (more particularly related to Carl's question, which mentions PoMo ousiology). And that's my issue/question.

Its my issue, insofar as my current understanding of all/most things Pomo (except Radical Orthodoxy, so far as I can tell) is that PoMo wants to run from the essences. Its my question insofar as I'm not sure if my understanding of all things PoMo is a correct one. There seems to be a sort of underlying "ousilogy" behind deconstruction, for example, which purports to deconstruct our objective/universal/modern notions of "essence." HOWEVER, so far as I can gather, the PoMo's don't seem down with what Aristotle would have meant by "essence," which was for him very tied to what is "elemental." Am I wrong there?

AND...I have another question. "Second, the issue pure and simply is Christianity is a globalized world and ultimately eschatology." If "The GloboChrist is not a 'Badiouan' event, but a Deleuzian one, which I will explain later, if anyone cares [hint hint, please explain :) ]"...then I have to ask if the Badiou/Deleuze debate isn't in fact of central importance here. Which is odd, since it at first appeared to me as a "sidetrack," as well...and since I don't know Badiou and Deleuze so well. But, just on a basic level, then, considering my lack of expertise here...it would seem that...if the whole point is that Deleuze over-processifies Christian eschotology...if we read Christian eschatology through Deleuze...and that if Badiou's whole issue/point in the debated essay is to break from that particuarly Deleuzian processification (so to speak)...then the Badiou/Deleuze question is in fact an important one, in itself. Or am I missing something here?

Apparently it seems that Dominic's sidetracking question of Dr. Carl's philosophical credentials, which far outweigh my own (immeasurably, probably) lead to a question of central importance, despite itself.

And my two questions about "ousiology" (I am highly entertained by that word) and eschotology are interwined. Not that Badiou is a Trinitarian or anything, but his eschatology seems to lend itself to a more human picture of what, to me, is "essentially" human. That we occupy a particular location, have a place, limits, ect. Two critical examples of "limits" belonging to what distinguishes us as human: a) mortality, and b) epistemological limits...

...i.e. Aquinas (the lobster thing: "ST I, Q. 16, Article 1...Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily. The reason of this is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, whereas our intellect, as have said above (85, 1), understands by abstracting the intelligible species from such matter. Now what is abstracted from individual matter is the universal. Hence our intellect knows directly the universal only. But indirectly, and as it were by a kind of reflection, it can know the singular...Article 4...Speaking, however, of the knowledge of the future in a general way, we must observe that the future may be known in two ways: either in itself, or in its cause. The future cannot be known in itself save by God alone; to Whom even that is present which in the course of events is future, forasmuch as from eternity His glance embraces the whole course of time, as we have said above when treating of God's knowledge (14, 13). But forasmuch as it exists in its cause, the future can be known by us also.")...

...hence my previous question of "who is the lobster?," based on my observation that the angst of Deleuzian becoming is only angst if we want to ourselves be the lobster (and our own wanting to be the lobster comes along with Deleuzian modalism, I think)...

The "limit" thing there seems to go with Badiou's "break" speak in the essay in qeustion. In other words, Badiou ain't no orthodox Christian, but to me it seems that his eschotological picture lends itself more easily to orthodox Trinitarianism (a certain kind of deliniated personhood, rather than an "impersonal transcendental field"), althogh it obviously isn't actually that (since Badiou seems to himself place the event inside of exactly such an "impersonal transcendental field," since he himself said that Sarte was right about such an idea).

:)

Jason

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Thanks for your clear and generous response.

I think we are in agreement as to the fundamental principle: first a Christian, then a “whatever”---which, however, doesn’t preclude taking the proponents of the “whatever” seriously. The really interesting question, of course, is what this means in concreto. You write, for instance, that “the interesting thing about Christian history is that faith constantly seeks understanding by appropriating the discourse of its age to raise fundamental faith-questions (not theological questions necessarily) in a different way than in the past.” But “appropriating the discourse of the age” is going to look different depending on what sort of discourse the age uses. Appropriating Aristole in the late 1200’s is in many ways different from appropriating Marx in 1968---or Deleuze in 2007. It’s fatal, both for Christianity and for philosophy, simply to let the “latest” set the agenda.

I’m not at all opposed to taking Deleuze or Badiou or Derrida seriously. Nor am I opposed to allowing them to ask us difficult questions, to keep us on our toes intellectually. What bugs me, aside from the post-modern esotericism that you rightly criticize, is the tendency among contemporary Christians, especially evengelicals (I write, by the way, as a sympathetic Roman Catholic) to appropriate post-modernism in a way that is bad both for faith and for philosophy. To me, this tendency looks like this: “recovering fundamentalists” latch on to the post-modern critique of “modern reason” because they see it as a way of simultaneously (a) getting beyond what they think is the false assurance of fundamentalism while (b) making room for faith by demolishing (modern) reason. The problem with this tendency is that it risks overestimating the possibility of “domesticating” post-modernism in the way that a lot of so-called Christian rock artists overestimate the possibility of domesticating rock. The result is the worst of both worlds: a sanitized post-modernism coupled with a willingness to concede too much without sufficient reflection.

For example: granting that we should allow Deleuze and co. to raise uncomfortable questions about substance, we also need to ask ourselves what is lost, both philosophically and theologically, by jettisoning it. For example: if we toss the notion of substance, can we still honestly pray the Nicene Creed (“consubstantial with the Father”). Again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t rethink substance in light of post-modern criticisms and questions---that’s just part and parcel of philosophy. What I am saying is simply in the Christianity and postmodernism discussion there needs to be more openness to the possibility that the way to achieve the laudable goals associated with the post-modern critique of substance (although the goals need to be thought through, too) is not simply to nix substance, but to tease out hidden or ignored riches in Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, and so forth.

Finally, to points with regard to globalization, eschatology, and event. First, I think globalization is a substitue eschatology. It’s a symptom of modernity as the idea that democracy, the market, and technology represent the in principle final solution to the human problem. But perhaps that is what you mean. Second, if that is true, I don’t see why Badiou or Deleuze---however interpreted---recommend themselves particularly for thinking about globalization and eschatology. In fact, even if what I say is not true, I still don’t see why “event” a la Badiou or Deleuze or whoever is the best way to go at the issue.

But this may have something to do with the fact that I need more explanation about what is meant by the problem of globalization and eschatology. Even granting that you’ve accurately described a current geo-political phenomenon, what is the philosophical or theological issue embedded in it---and why should “event” be the best category for dealing with it? If you agree with me that globalization is a substitute eschatology---or, at least, risks beoming that---then I can see how the incalculability of “event” could be a corrective. But why not rather talk about, for instance, the tragic nature of human existence, or man’s creatureliness---categories that don’t require us to subscribe to the dubious implications of saying that “[sh]it” just happens? The Colombian philosopher Gomez Davila says that man is a problem with no human solution---without any postmodern apparatus. Why do we need it?

(I’m being polemical in order to spark the kind of discussion I think needs to happen on this sort of website. We need less enthusiastic presentation of this or that aspect of this or that post-modern thinker coupled with more or less well-thought out suggestions about how to apply it to our problems---we need less of that and more direct discussion of the issues).

Thanks for your willingness to dialogue.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Carl]

Adrian,
You have raised EXCELLENT questions here, and I want to take the time to respond deliberately and thoughtfully. It's going to take a while to formulate an answer adequate to what you are asking, and I won't have to do that until late tomorrow (meanwhile, the blog may move on, but we'll keep going). Peace.
Carl

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Thanks for your kind and quick response. I look forward to your further remarks and to continued discussion.

This is a rare gift indeed: an internet conversation in which it's actually possible to engage and be engaged around meaty issues. So, once again, thanks for that.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Carl a]

PROBLEM 1. Postmodernism and the question of substance. The critique of substance - i.e., anti-essentialism - begins with Nietzsche and reaches full flower in the thought of Heidegger. Heidegger's project of "overcoming metaphysics" constitutes the backdrop to all postmodernism. The anti-essentialist, or should we say "anessentialist", movement dominates most twentieth century philosophy, including Anglo-American philosophy - logical positivism and linguistic analysis. Sometimes we forget that "postmodern philosophy" simply took its precursors for granted and formulated a rococo variation on what went before it, which is why even someone like Zizek - the pomo "bad boy" - somewhat accurately proclaims that postmodernism is really just a late form of "late modernism." We can't go back to an essentialist world any more than we can go back to a communications world dominated by typewriters or a transportation world dominated by steamships. That would be antemodern, or at most late modern (the age of Spinoza).

But we can - if I can paraphrase Heidegger - rethinking that essentialist world in a way that essentialism itself was incapable of thinking. That is what pomophilosophers should be doing, a charge given to them by Heidegger himself. Another gripe I have about today's pomodish types is that they don't think for themselves but act like rock band groupies, following, adulating, and wearing the scented bracelets of one stylish French philosopher after another (it's Tuesday, it must be Badiou). "I can tell you, I think, everything Badiou said or what he I think he meant, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me why it matters."

PROBLEM 2. Essentialism and eschatology. The Nicean move has a genealogy, as Nietzsche would say (who said it long before Foucault). Niceanism was a response to the Constantinian inauguration of the church in a world that knew only Greek philosophy. You can't find Niceanism - or "ousiological" nomenclature - anywhere in the Gospels, because it wasn't their language. But it was a nice way of working out the immanent/transcendent tension of Hebraic-Hellenized Scriptural revelation without resort to eschatology, which was very un-Greek. Unfortunately, Jesus spoke fluent eschatologese.

Globalization? Dominic seems to think that when you bring up the word you are siding with Fukuyama and the "end of history" triumphalism of market capitalism - so chi-chi in the 1990s - which of course is pidgeon puckie. Globalization is our condition and it can't be separated from postmodernism. Global economic integration is only one process among many others. That's the theme of my new book. Ironically, I take my cue from Derrida himself, who made the discovery in the 1990s. In FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE he says globalization means something he terms "the return of religion," religion that has been "de-culturated" (Olivier Roy's term) and transformed into a kind of global militancy. There's a reason we have al-Qaida, which is like anything we've ever seen on the world stage before, and it stems purely and simply from the the transformation of religious attitudes from ways of legitimating local, ethnic, and cultural identity into a force of global utopia-longing. What militant Islam is to the Middle East, a new militant Christianity of the "global South" (read Jenkins' THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM) is to Africa, Latin America, and new populations in India). This is not just "global Christianity" in the old geographical and crypto-colonial sense. It is "globo-Christianity," meaning it is yearning for a kind of parousia not taken seriously since the days of Diocletian.

Why "event talk," rather than the old-time ousiobabble? Well, to begin with, this ain't the age of Constantine any more.

If you read Jenkins' book (not a theology or philosophy book, but a quick history and sociology of global Christianity; he talks constantly of the "emerging church," but he isn't talking about ex-fundies who now read Derrida; he's talking about the tens of millions of new Christians of the "global South"), you will see that globalization is bringing about something very similar, now on a planetary scale, to what happened in the fifth through eleventh centuries after the fall of Rome. These Christians are not Nicene Christians; many of them still using the language of African animism, or equatorial shamanism that has adopted the lingo of Pentacostalism.

The ancien regime is the Christian West, particularly the liberal, secularised Christian West. As Louis XVI was reported to have said after hearing of the storming of the Bastille, "why is it a rebellion." "No, sire," came the reply, "c'est un revolution."

The father of event-talk was Nietzsche. He described "the death of God" as "an event that has not yet reached the ears of men." The death of God is the event that defines the horizons of the postmodern world. But the death of the secular, liberal West (really the Northwest) is the event that defines the horizons of even postmodern Christianity. It too is an "event that has not yet reached the ears" of today's theologians, even the "secular theologians" and the "weak theologians." As Jenkins writes, "there can be no doubt that the emerging Christian world will be anchored in the Southern continents." (p. 14).

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Thanks for your lively response. I’m honored to have been the occasion for this wonderful piece of writing. I find your criticism of pomo trendiness righ on target. I also agree that post-modernism is still modern---though I would add that anti-ousiology, the rejection of substance as either unknowable, or irrelevant, or non-existent, is actually present at the very beginning of modern thought.

One reason I’m grateful for your post, though, is that it highlights a couple of points which we can fruitfully disagree about. I’ll just highlight three.

First off, I think we disagree about the extent to which history legitimates or deligitimates intellectual positions. You seem to accord history a decisive role in this respect. For example, you write: “We can't go back to an essentialist world any more than we can go back to a communications world dominated by typewriters or a transportation world dominated by steamships. That would be antemodern, or at most late modern (the age of Spinoza).” My counter-question is: why can’t we? Obviously, we can’t go back if that means pretending that what’s happened in the meantime hasn’t actually happened. But surely it’s possible for someone to be an intelligent essentialist today.

In other words, I reject what I think---but correct me if I’m wrong---is a certain historicism underlying your argument. The reason I reject it is that I don’t think historicism works unless we presuppose that there is a Movement of History that takes over the functions of what “essentialism” would call truth.

Which brings up another problem: pure historicism doesn’t provide any distance from which to criticize history. But we need that distance. Otherwise, we can end up thinking that the Nazis are the Revelation of Being.

Now, I know you agree that we can distinguish between good and bad events. In fact, if I read you aright, you find the globalization of Christianity interesting (if not in every respect good [e.g. militancy]) insofar as it points beyond Hellenism (“ousiology”) and to the evental-eschatological character of the Gospel. But isn’t this to use a historicist argument---history forbids us to be ousiologists anymore---to make a non-historicist claim that “event” IS closer to the truth of a pre-Constantinian Christianity than, say, the metaphysical theology of the Fathers and the Middle Ages?

Perhaps this is not what you’re doing. But if not, then there’s even less reason to suppose that someone can’t intelligently hold the earlier metaphysical theology today---unless raw, unjudged history as such is itself the criterion of what can and cannot be held at any given time.

Second, I think we disagree about the relationship between Christianity and ousiology. I don’t agree that the Gospels are pure immanent/transcendent tension that for a while was translated into Greek ousiological categories. First of all, I don’t think a purely eschatological reading of the Gospels stands up exegetically. Second, while the Gospels aren’t works of philosophy, and while they don’t use technical “ousiological” vocabulary, they do have ousiological implications. For example, when Jesus asks “who do you say that I am?” Peter responds by saying “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The question of who Jesus IS is absolutely central in the Gospels (and not just in John). So it’s not immediately obvious that the Gospels are non-ousiological. This doesn’t mean that eschatological event is unimportant in the NT---but only that its importance stands or falls with the person of Jesus as risen Lord (which, I would argue, implies a non-adoptionist Christology.)

(Plus: why shouldn’t the original form of Christianity, even if it happens to coincide with what is going on today, be subject to historical obsolescence---unless Jesus is literally still alive in heaven?)

To put it provocatively: how does globalized Christianity in your sense differ from a Harnack-style de-hellenized Christianity with a post-modern twist?

In this sense, I don’t see why the Nicene Creed can’t continue to function as a standard of orthodoxy. Which means that, if the new Christianity isn’t Nicene, then there are grounds for wondering to what extent it’s actually Christian.

Again, this is not to deny the evental or eschatological. It’s simply to say that we shouldn’t oppose it to the ousiological. Classical trinitarian doctrine actually integrated the two: within the divine being, it said, there is relation, mutual self-giving, and so forth.

Third, it’s clear that Dominic West was ascribing to you a Fukuyamaism you don’t hold. But I do think he has a point, namely, that “globalization” is in the first instance the result of a world-wide expansion of the Western formula of state-market-technology. Obviously, the formula isn’t evenly actualized in every place. But it is influential in every place---think of how China, though non-democratic on the state front, is rushing to destroy every last vestige of traditional Chinese culture in order to catch up with the West.

Now, this doesn’t mean that globalization doesn’t bring a whole raft of phenomena in its own right---such as Al Qaeda or the explosion of new kinds of Christianities. What it does mean, though, is that it’s not immediately obvious that these phenomena are nothing but evental ruptures of Eurocentrism. In other words, if globalization results from the exportation of the state-market-technology formula, then terrorism or animistic pentacostalism can at least plausibly be read as a Western-influenced syncretism that doesn’t actually escape the Western formula. For example, Al Qaeda uses Western technology and media against the West, etc. The secular liberal West may not be as dead as you think.

Which leads to a final observation. You speak of “the transformation of religious attitudes from ways of legitimating local, ethnic, and cultural identity into a force of global utopia-longing.” In one sense, I agree: the universalism of the Western formula rubs off on the syncretisms it genrates. But the universalism of the Western formula is in some respects a secularization of the universalism of Christianity (“go and baptize all nations”)---a universalism that is actually expressed in, rather than contradicted in any way by, Nicene orthodoxy (“through whom all things were made”). In fact, Christendom, however misguided we may think it is, was an attempt to actualize this universalism. (And remember: the Middle East was once the seat of vaster Christendoms than existed in the West at the time.)

On the other hand: “local, ethnic, and cultural identity,” while obviously liable to abuse, is also something worth saving. The global integration of the market destroys local cultures and economies---is this a good thing simply? Are we happy that English village life was destroyed by the industrial revolution? I’m not suggesting you think it is. The point is simply this: if that destruction is not, or not only, a good thing, then we need critical distance from globalization. But if we need critical distance from globalization, then we can’t let it dictate our ontology (or non-ontology). We’re going to need some trans-historical platform, like human nature, or the Risen God-Man (who contains the full truth of human nature), to judge historical developments.

So maybe even from a historical point of view we can’t afford NOT to be ousiologists after all.

Cordially,
Adrian

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

I’ve just realized with regret that I neglected to acknowledge that I had heard and understood your main thesis. Let me redress that. If I understand you correctly---but tell me if I am wrong---you’re saying that orthodox post-modernism not only don’t fully deserve the “post,” insofar as it’s still thinking its way out of the horizon of modern Western culture, but also, because of that, is missing out on where the “post” is actually happening: in the globalization of Christianity. So what you are trying to do in part is alert the orthodox post-modernists to the fact that history has passed them by, that it’s out-evented orthodox post-modernism by actually doing what the orthodox think they’re doing---even though you acknowledge that the thinkers who are the banners for the post-modern orthodox did work out categories (like event) that help us make sense out of this new historical twist (even as this means that we free to use their work in creative ways that may make the orthodox mad). Am I hearing you correctly? If so, I do want to say that I agree at least with this much: the explosion of Christianities in the Global South IS an event, whose significance we need to ponder, aware that the Spirit is trying to tell us something new. And this something new may have to do with event and eschatology or with rediscovering those dimensions of Christianity. My point is only that it would be a mistake to oppose event and eschatology to substance---both because the opposition isn’t necessary and also because it leaves us with no choice but a kind of historicism that is ultimately incoherent and that leaves us criterionless before whatever is happening. The task would be to recover how, for example, trinitarian theology integrates substance and event as the key to sorting through the phenomena of the times.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Jaosn Hesiak]

Carl,

I defer to Adrian. He addressed your comment in the way that I would have, but better, and more clearly. I would like to add that, just because we might still think like an ousiologist (not a word, but I just wanted to say it...it sounds very very funny to me...because I think in generaly you could say that any "ology" is anti-"ousi"), does not mean that you think like a Descartian or a Kantian or WhoeverModernian...although you seemed to imply as much in your own comment, since you mentioned the medieval theologians.

And...although Fukayama annoys the crap out of me...I agree with Adrian here, too:

"In other words, if globalization results from the exportation of the state-market-technology formula, then terrorism or animistic pentacostalism can at least plausibly be read as a Western-influenced syncretism that doesn’t actually escape the Western formula. For example, Al Qaeda uses Western technology and media against the West, etc. The secular liberal West may not be as dead as you think."

I wanted to clarify a little my position on that, since I hadn't spoken up on it previously. ALTHOUGH...there's probably MUCH to that discussion to which Adrian and Carl are privy, but which I probably am not...which is why I did not weigh on in that part previously.

One thing that should certainly be added to that discussion, though (of which I do know). Let me first quote Adrian: "But the universalism of the Western formula is in some respects a secularization of the universalism of Christianity ('go and baptize all nations')---a universalism that is actually expressed in, rather than contradicted in any way by, Nicene orthodoxy ('through whom all things were made'). In fact, Christendom, however misguided we may think it is, was an attempt to actualize this universalism. (And remember: the Middle East was once the seat of vaster Christendoms than existed in the West at the time.)"

I don't think that the issue is even that the Kingdom of Medieval Catholicism was really really big. I think the issue is more that it was "ideally", or "essentially" taken to be sacredly universal...with culturally local manifestations (like today). G.K. Chesterton speaks of how this was an "ideal" that was "abandoned" all too quickly. Not that I necessarily agree with Chesterton (the heck if I know/have a position on that!?), but I just figured that he idea should be mentioned, since I think it pertains). Especially in consideration of our question of "ousiology," since Chesterton speaks of the Universal Church as an "ideal."

And I ESPECIALLY agree with Adrian here: "The global integration of the market destroys local cultures and economies---is this a good thing simply? Are we happy that English village life was destroyed by the industrial revolution? I’m not suggesting you think it is. The point is simply this: if that destruction is not, or not only, a good thing, then we need critical distance from globalization. But if we need critical distance from globalization, then we can’t let it dictate our ontology (or non-ontology). We’re going to need some trans-historical platform, like human nature, or the Risen God-Man (who contains the full truth of human nature), to judge historical developments."

In my mind, this question of "village life" is quite related to what I said above: "Not that Badiou is a Trinitarian or anything, but his eschatology seems to lend itself to a more human picture of what, to me, is 'essentially' human. That we occupy a particular location, have a place, limits, ect. Two critical examples of "limits" belonging to what distinguishes us as human: a) mortality, and b) epistemological limits..." To me the referenced "epistemological limits"...when considered in light of Adrian's "trans-historical platform, like human nature, or the Risen God-Man"...is very connected to what a city wall is...which is irrelevant to the historical development of globalism.

I would also agree with Adrian about ousilogy's first signs of being discarded as having occured at the beginning of modernity. Something I wrote to someone else recently: "My point here, in regards again to bodies, scale, limits and locatoin, is that the shift from ancient to modern involved one that fundamentally dwarfed and made irrelevant the human body [and for this discussion, we could also mention human "personhood"], which was previously so central to man's understanding of who and how he was in the world. The modern body [and person] is dwarfed and made irrelevant (relatively) precisly because of the 'explosion' [to reference McLuhan...on specialization] that occured as the defining moment of the start of modernity. The human body has no 'real' rational relationship to the globe [in the context of that conversation, the 'real' was in relation to the notion of 'real time' and contemporary satellite/electric technologies], and yet the globe sets the field of play, defines the location and/or deliniates the limits of modern life."

For me...architecturally...the following is very imporant (to me very relevant to the rest of my comment, and to the discussion in general): "My point is only that it would be a mistake to oppose event and eschatology to substance---both because the opposition isn’t necessary and also because it leaves us with no choice but a kind of historicism that is ultimately incoherent and that leaves us criterionless before whatever is happening. The task would be to recover how, for example, trinitarian theology integrates substance and event as the key to sorting through the phenomena of the times."

This is important to me, BECAUSE I need a GROUND upon which to begin to build (but I'm less interested in a "cause"). I need an "arche" for my arche-tekton. "In the beginning was the Word." Beginning, there of course, has both ousilogical and eventual connotations for me. And since I couldn't give less of a hoot about the Intelligent Design/Evolution/Creationism debate (just to give an example), I don't have the exact relationship between the eventual and ousiological connotations of that verse worked out in my head.

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

By the way, I'm "Jason," rather than Jaosn. I don't know anyone named "Jaosn," so I have no idea where my type-happy fingers came up with that one, lol. As Aquinas would say in this instance, sense does not really know quite what's going on; so I guess my fingers didn't exactly realize what they were doing. It was my mind who should have known, lol.

Also, Carl, I too appreciate your dialoguing with us. I think its pretty cool.

[Dominic Fox]

To call Zizek a "pomo 'bad boy'" is almost as aggravating as Zizek's own habit of consistently referring (almost always disparagingly) to "postmodernism and deconstructionism" as if a) there were really ever such a thing as the latter, and b) it and postmodernism were more or less the same thing. But then it appears that it appears, to some observers, that postmodernism and everything else - at least since Heidegger laid down his pen - are more or less the same thing.

This rather pertinent question:

if "deterritorialization" destroys substantial identities (personal, cultural, national), what keeps this movement from being at the service of, or at least appropriated by, the enormous yet insubstantial power of Capital before which everything becomes like mist?

is one which Capitalism and Schizophrenia also poses, in quite an interesting way. Capitalism is presented in Anti-Oedipus as a "war machine" which deterritorializes in order to reterritorialize, substituting its own axiomatic for the codings it unbinds. Deterritorialization in this context isn't in any straightforward sense a synonym for "de-essentialization" or "de-substantialization", isn't a one-way process, and isn't a sort of metaphysical trend.

[Jason Hesiak]

Interestingly my studio professor quoted Marx with "All things melt into air" when I asked him about Marx's relation to the GROUND.

[Dominic Fox]

"All that is solid melts into air" - which is Marx quoting Shakespeare, of course.

Funnily enough, I was listening on the train back from Scotland to Zizek's lecture where he related this to Hegel's bondsman on the one hand and Heidegger on the question of technology on the other. Z suggested that this had to do with an experience of "terror" (radical ontological destabilisation) rather than of "angst". It was, if I may say so, not noticeably postmodern.

[Dominic Fox]

Ah - and here is my friend Daniel's excellent (and fairly reliable) account of the lecture...

My big enemy here today is going to postmodern politics - all about contingency, difference, democracy, blahblahblah. My view is that we need the exact opposite of this - necessity, identity, universality - and true revolutionary politics has always been about these things! If you look at French Revolution, it was Jacobins who were saying that there are these absolute values, universal human rights - and conservatives who were the ones saying contingency, difference...

[adrian walker]

Dear Jason,

Thanks a lot for your kind words and excellent reflections. I think what you say about the dwarfing of the human body in modernity is really, really important. Wendell Berry says that the problem of scale is the central, or one of the central, problems of our time. I think he's right and I think your idea about the body helps explain why.

It's bedtime here in Germany, so I'll catch you guys tomorrow morning my time.

Sleep tight.

Adrian

[Jason Hesiak]

Thanks Adrian. And you're welcome.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

perhaps I have been overly formed by Zizek and Badiou (I have read little Deleuze), but Dominic perfectly summarizes (via Zizek) where I feel we need to be going concerning politics and philosophy. and I agree that if we are going to add a 'post' to Zizek/Badiou, it will have to be 2 (post-post-modern, all that comes after Derrida and Co, and being essentially against them).

Also, along with Adrian and Jason, against Heidegger's trajectory in "Being and Time" which opposes the history of metaphysics (of ousilogy) to that of the discloser of Being (whose temporal aspects have been picked up by Derrida and Levinas in different directions, the former in the Future and the latter in the Past), it seems that Badiou in his "Being and Event" explicitly attempts to establish links between ontology and eschatology via his understanding of mathematical multiplicity (ontology) and events (eschatology) through a faithful subject.

Of course b/c I haven't read much of Delueze I don't know how he knots and unknots these issues. But is seems that we need not oppose essences and eschatology just like we need not oppose hellenism and hebraism.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

and I was trying to recall the Marx quote from memory and it came out all wrong (this is why I write things down)...so yes my original question about Deleuze and deterritorialization is that it plays into the hands of Capitalism before which "All that is solid melts into air."

Thanks Dominic for the reference.

[Carl a]

Globalization: as someone who spent my younger years immersed in Marxist scholastic dialectics, I find it interesting that there seems to be much anxiety in these exchanges about Deleuze's "nomad nomos" somehow "playing into" the hands of global capital, where "global capital" is somehow seen as a kind of state actor, or set of actors, written large (hence the routine activist focus on the G8 summit). As I used to remind my "cultural Marxist" interlocutors in those debates, Marx himself was not a moralist when it came to capital. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was not about turning back the historical tide of "deculturation" and deracination which ultimately manifested in class conflict. The Marxist program was always to turn the tide of "consciousness" so that the power of capital, which Marxist analysis has always taken as a given, could be transferred to the "real" accumulators of surplus value, hence the "expropriation of the expropriators." The issue was never capital; it was always expropriation.

The same holds true for globalization. That is why someone like Badiou (who I admit still retains his Marxist loyalties, though not his Maoism, since you can't really be a Maoist today anyway; I should know, I was one) has nothing but contempt for the anti-G8 activists and makes disparaging allusions to Hardt and Negri.

Globalization is Deleuze's nomad nomos that is "universally historicized". As for Marx, its "form" is capital, but its "force" is something else. For Marx, it was labor power that takes back from surplus value accmulation what rightfully is labor's. In my new book I argue, in effect, that it is the GloboChrist (not "globalized Christianity" which is a historical signature and "active force" affirming the former). In FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE Derrida suspected it was "religion," though he was more interested in a kind of "autoimmune" reaction that scholars would label fundamentalism than he was in the force of faith and the communio sanctorum, a Christian concept.

Historicism is a dead 19th century "ism." Foucault demolished it in THE ORDER OF THINGS. Historicism is a sense of the vagaries of history minus the power of history. Nietsche himself made a similar point in the USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. The choice is not between "ousiology" and "historicism." Christianity is neither, though it projects itself - to use a Deleuzian term which I do in my book, it "indigenizes" itself - in these forms. If the language of the Christ faith could be expressed simply in "ouisal" terms, then we wouldn't in the creed say "suffered under Pontious Pilate." The faith indigenizes itself, because God indigenized himself - you know, that incarnation business. "Suffered under Pontius Pilate." And..."will come again to judge the quick and the dead." Ousiology that is bent - one giant historical catachresis - in the direction of "parouisa," the fullness of presence, misleadingly translated the "second Coming." You can't have ousia without parousia. That's the meaning of Nicea. The Cross as a divergent series - salvation and damnation - that drives in the direction of the final historical "sense" of God's proposition that is human history - the eschatological..."will come again to judge the quick and the dead."

Marx kind of got the GloboChrist mixed up with the proleteriat (he mistook persona for "class"), but at least in terms of his analysis he was more Deleuzian than we realize, and of hich many postmodernists who ritually intone the name of Marx have hardly a clue.

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

I have to confess that I don’t follow all the ins and outs of the argument of your last post, partly because I’m not completely familiar with your technical vocabulary or frame(s) of reference. Let me confine myself, then, to three general points.

First, I did not accuse you of consciously reviving some 19th-century school of thought. My point was that you made, and make, claims that seem to presuppose historicism in a broad, non-technical sense, namely, as the thesis that it’s history and not, say, trans-historical standards that determine the tenability or not of intellectual positions. For example: when you write “you can’t really be a Maoist today,” that sounds historicist to me in my sense.

Second, I agree that you can’t express Christianity in ousial terms alone, but that you also need the evental. My point is rather that you also can’t express Christianity in evental terms alone, but that you also need the ousial. Nicea is about both: the consubstantial Son . . . suffered under Pontius Pilate.

Of course, my position presupposes that “ousiology” needn’t be identified with a drive to “pure presence.” This identification seems to be universally taken for granted in these kinds of discussions. Let’s critically discuss this identification---as well as the pertinence of categories like “presence.” And what if Heidegger (or Derrida) is wrong about the history of philosophy?

What bothers me is the assumption that we can toss substance without losing other important things, for example, standards of judgment transcending raw historical process. Of course, this assumption can be intelligently argued for---but that is the point: it needs to be argued for, not just assumed.

Third, you’re right to reject the moralization of globalization---if by that you mean things like childishly blaming “greedy corporations” for all our woes. But I think it is dangerous to refuse the possibility of any kind of moral critique of globalization. Wouldn’t that run the risk of treating globalization as some kind of Great Necessity, as the Voice of Being, or something like that? That is what I mean by historicism: the idea of “History” as some kind of “force” that is inevitably rolling in some direction. What happens when the direction sucks?

A final point: I think we’ve got a really interesting issue here, namely, the issue of substance and/or event and how that bears on interpreting and judging history. If anything I’ve said goes in the direction of an “You said that, no I didn’t” debate, then please forget it. All I want to say is this: we have, to repeat, a really interesting issue here that we should discuss on its own terms. It would be great if we could do that.

Dear Geoff,

Thanks for the remark about Badiou. Could you explain what you/he means and how that addresses the issue?

Cordially,
Adrian

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Here is another way of putting my question(s). It sounds like what you are saying is that globalization (in your sense of the term) is an Event---the defining Event of our present historical constellation---and that what this Event is about is (Globo)Christ. Now, a thesis like this---if it is indeed your thesis---is bound to raise the following question. Someone will surely ask:

“OK, I can follow you if you mean that the increasing intermixing of cultures, etc. is creating a new kind of Christianity that can teach the old kind of Christianity a thing or too. BUT, I can’t follow you if you mean that there’s some kind of immanent movement of history towards (Globo)Christ. In other words, I can go along with the bit about the new kind of Christianity---but I can’t accept basing that thesis on any claims about the immanent movement of history.”

Of course, you might reject the language of immanent movement of history. My point is simply that Event, “it happens,” could sound very much like a new version of that idea. And it’s precisely here that a whole host of questions would arise: why call the Event GloboChrist? How do we judge an “it happens” if event simply trumps substance? Etc.

On the other hand, it may be (and I mean this unironically) that I have totally missed your point. If that should be the case, then it would show at the very least that we need more discussion.

Again, I realize that I am formulating things sharply here. This is not because I am trying to defeat your thesis, but because I think your thesis is interesting, but am trying to explain clearly the objections I think it is likely to encounter, based on the kinds of questions it raises in my mind. So I am not trying to end the discussion, but to focus it.

Cordially,
Adrian

[Dominic]

Badiou might say: one can no longer be a Maoist as such, because the political sequence of Maoism is "saturated" and permits no further novelty (rather than because it is "exhausted" and funds no further expenditure); it is then a question of whether a fidelity to the fidelity is possible, a re-opening of the site to which the original truth procedure was faithful. In this sense, he would not say that he was an "ex-Maoist", since that would imply an abandonment of the site, a willingness to let it fall into obscurity.

"Fidelity to the fidelity" is in a way Badiou's version of "religion without religion" - Maoism without Maoism, disseminated beyond the political horizons of the cultural revolution, soixante-huitard French militant leftism and so on. GloboMao? Let's hope not...

[Carl R.]

Adrian,you seem to be suspicious of history. Why? You can't be a Christian and be suspicious of history, deriding it simply as an "immanent process." Call Christian theology a "mustard seed theory of history." Is the following an "immanent process"? "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he 'has put everything under his feet.' Now when it says that 'everything' has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all." (1 Cor. 15:20-28, NIV)
I know Teilhard used that passage to talk about the "omega point," but he probably reduced New Testament "immanentanism" to a kind of neo-Stoic teleology. It's there in Scripture, and it's key. Augustine couldn't have written CIVITAS DEI without it. Deleuze didn't attempt to be a theologian (nor did he discourage it, he just wanted to avoid any suggestion of "transcendentalism"), but I'm sure if he hadn't been a "post-metaphysical" sort of guy, he would have offered his own semiotics of the rhizome to make sense (not a teleological sense) out of these sorts of passages.

Marxism, even Maoism, is inherently "eschatological", particularly if we discard - as we are obliged to do - even the weakest intimiations of Aristotelian/Hegelian/Heidegerrian entelechic thinking. Eschatology signifies both limit and fulfillment, a limit to all history and "immanent processes" and a "fulfillment" in the sense of sending forth what had always remained hidden, perhaps the "undeconstructable". I believe Dominic referenced Zizek's nostalgia for Marxist universalism. In Zizek it is a nostalgia that discloses the "eschatological" limits of Derridism and any kind of "theology without theology."

As for Mao, Dominic, you make a good point. But I see Badiouian "fidelity without fidelity" as just the latest version of Sartrean "engagement." In DELEUZE Badiou talks about his debt to Sartre. French Marxism could never become revolutionary because it was, as Sartre admitted, overly Cartesian and anhistorical. It was a "humanism" that was first and foremost an "existentialism." This existentialist Marxism is the real spectre that haunts the left today. It is the spectre that haunts the cerebral palaces of the entire "post-Christian West." It is the mother of all Derridean specters. Let us call it ethics without eschatology, purposefulness without political purpose (as Kant might say), Nietzschean Wille zur Macht minus pure affirmation, i.e., a more satisfying form of resenntiment.

If one refuses to prefix the historical with the "globo," one refuses any "universalism," even if it is not Enlightenment universalism or Hegelian universalism. One refuses the "panta" of both Scripture and all "immanent eschatologies," such as Marxism. One can therefore not call oneself a revolutionary. Fidelity must be faithful to an indirect "object", a Levinasian tout autre that engages us even if we are not engaged. Otherwise, faithfulness is just a fancy word for "difficult freedom." If one cannot be faithful to the Hegelian "concept," one can be faithful to the person of Christ, who "draws us" to him. Otherwise, one can merely pout through the apocalypse.

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Thanks for your response. No, I am not suspicious of history. I am suspicious of the claim that there is nothing but history. Let me be clear: I am not saying you think there is nothing but history. What I am saying is that I do not yet understand how you avoid that conclusion if you simply jettison ousiology.

I have no problem with immanence. I have no problem with God being immanent in history. I do not deride history as merely immanent process. I am simply asking how your account of history differs from a reduction of it to merely immanent process. I don’t say you want to reduce it to merely immanent process. My problem is that I sincerely do not understand how that can be avoided without something like ousiology.

I agree that Christianity gives history a dignity that, say, Plato and Aristotle don’t. Christianity is novel. No question about that. What I object to is the idea that, in order to secure this novelty, we’ve got to jettison ousiology. What I am proposing is a marriage of history and ousiology that preserves the best of both---that is what Nicea is about.

I love the passage you quote. I have no problem interpreting it in the sense of a cosmic Christ who works from within the inmost core of the world. Like I said, I have no problem with immanence. BUT---the passage also says that Jesus is no longer subject to the laws of this world, in other words, that the resurrection transcends the world, too. So, once again, it’s not an either-or of immanence versus transcendence, or ousiology versus history. Both have to be accounted for.

Is the globo-Christ the risen Jesus of Nazareth who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead? Can we answer that question affirmatively without ousiology.

In other words: I think there is an actual intellectual problem here which I would formulate in terms of the relationship between history and ousia and the bearing this relationship has on how we interpret current events. I would sincerely like to discuss this issue with you. But if you don’t think it’s an issue worth discussing, then (I hope I am not sounding petulant) this will be my last post on my thread.

Cordially,
Adrian

[adrian walker]

Dear Carl,

Yikes---that did sound petulant. I guess I am a bit frustrated, because we seem to be talking past each other. I THINK I understand what you are trying to do---use resources of pomo creatively in the service of the discernment of the working of the Spirit today, of "what the Spirit saith to the churches." History, eschatology, the critique of at least a certain ousiology---d'accord. But I do think there's an interesting question here about whether as Christians and philosophers we can do without ousiology of some sort. Do you agree? Or am I just massively missing the point?

Cordially,
Adrian

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Geoff,

Don't misunderstand the account of deterritorialization to be an absolute advocation for it! This is the huge mistake that most critics of the C&S make. Not sure how, seeing as it is obvious in the text. Daniel Bell's critique is premised on this misreading, for what it is worth.