the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Hunger and Love - The Logic of "Late Capitalism" Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse

By Carl Raschke

It’s another gray and misty morning here in the second district of Vienna.  The church bells toll to invite the sleepy-eyed revelers from the night before to churches that, except for Christmas tourists, will probably remain mostly empty. 

The second district is historically the Jewish district of Vienna, where Freud lived and hung out.  For some unfathomable reason Freud is in the air, virtually “everywhere”  these days.   His books are on sale, his named invoked regularly (even in newspaper ads), and he often serves as a self-identifier, as in the case of a student I know who met a girl at a Vienna dance club who in response to the standard, get-to-know-each-other  question “what do you do?” replied, “I’m a Freudian analyst, so what do you think now?” 

Perhaps the answer was simply intended as a well-practiced feint against any presumed,  male, predatory Anmarsch, as they say here.   But the “Freudian thing,” as his “Ur-postmodernist” French psychoanalyst descendant Jacques Lacan put it, may be more the temper of the times than we care to admit.   

In Civilization and its Discontents – a text that figures such as Derrida and Deleuze, for example, tend to cite – Freud sums up what might be called the “secular eschatological” implications of his lifelong work with the following quote from the German poet Schiller: “hunger and love serve as the gearworks of the world.” 

Freud was an infamous pessimist, and he certainly had nothing to "say" directly to Christian theology these days.  You can’t “take Freud to church” – really!   But Freud was definitely someone theologians should listen to, especially if you go prowling the streets of Vienna, or any European city, or any city at all for that matter, this late autumn.  You observe the growing numbers of beggars and prostitutes and every morning.  You see a new, more disturbing headline about the slow-motion economic meltdown of the EU, not to mention the ever louder warnings from economists about its apocalyptic implications for the world economy.   

Hunger and love!  Until 2008 the “gearworks” worked magnificently to generate an ever expanding global  consumer society that was supposed  to gradually alleviate all hungers by fulfilling every symbolizable and estimable desire.   Yes, we were worried about things like climate change, prompted by our using too much energy to produce too much “stuff”.   But that could be handled by both a new consensual system of intergovernmental policies and regulations and the adoption of new lifestyles that were “post-materialist,” even if they remained highly consumerist.   “Information” and “knowledge” leave no carbon footprint – allegedly.  Our increasing consumption and production of “significations” rather than material commodities -  i.e., Baudrillard’s distinction between the “hyperreal” and the real – would solve that problem, so we were told.    

It is the hyperreal that has done us in, however, I fear.   Although Baudrillard’s term converges with many familiar,  key philosophical terms used in postmodernist discourse, such as Lacan’s “symbolic order”  or Deleuze’s “difference machine,”  the force of its meaning remains symptomatic  of why the world order today appears to be inexorably and ever more painfully unwinding.    Baudrillard a generation ago playfully characterized the hyperreal as the order of “processing simulacra”, of self-generating significations in the form of commodity images, fantasies, political and social ideas, collective idealizations,  and so forth.  He argued that these idealizations take on a life of their own, and that we become increasingly unaware that they do not somehow rest on any tangible base stratum of things, a theme popularized in such movies as The Truman Show and The Matrix.   

But, more importantly, we do not recognize their generative and addictive power to guarantee what our senses assume is “really” real.  Hence, the expression “hyperreal”, which according to Baudrillard is “more real than real.”    The triumph of hyperreality in our time can thus be considered a reversal of the old order of repressed desires, which Freud diagnosed, in the sense that their purely virtual character now function as a whole new form of “repression” or unconsciously displaced meaning (the real force of Freud’s term Verdrängnis)  .   Just as our Victorian ancestors could not confront the fact that we are intimately bound up in material reality, we cannot confront our immateriality.   

Consider derivatives.   These so-called “special investment vehicles” (SIVs) proved to be the Achilles heel of the ever exploding global economy before 2008.   Although it was the collapse of the American real estate market that technically triggered the crisis, it was the so-called  derivatives that sent the worldwide jerry-rigged system into a downward spiral, which is still continuing.   As in mathematics, a “derivative” in finance is nothing more than a set of signifying linkages, the notational equivalent  of  “difference” in the relations between two or more functions. The word “spreads”, which one hears constantly right now with regard to the European debt  crisis, has a similar set of characteristics.  Without going into the technical details of what these words mean in investment parlance, we can say that the long-standing growth of “casino capitalism” was driven by a constant leveraging of the spreads, or differentials, in the mathematical algorithms that defined the new computerized global marketplace.  Much of what people actually invested in had nothing to do with commodities, real estate, the net worth of companies, and so on.  Investment increasingly was targeted toward “speculative” interrelationships between abstract calculative processes. 

This tendency to pursue an economy of pure sign functions is not some perverse immoral imperative foisted on us by the “one percent,” the “greedy multinational corporations,” or the faceless “speculators”, as garden variety anti-capitalist rhetoric routinely intones.    It follows the “logic of late capitalism” itself, as  Jameson referred to postmodernism as a whole in his book by the same title that appeared in 1991 (See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism, Verson, 1991) .  Jameson was in many ways prescient, although his work was considered largely  cranky and obscurantist at the time. 

Like Žižek, who rose to notoriety during the decade immediately after the book’s publication, Jameson did not see “postmodernism” as some new, emancipatory phase in the development of politics and culture.  He saw it as a form of worn-out modernism, at least in the cultural sphere.  In the economic  realm he regarded it as the final stage of the world-historical process Marx had analyzed in Capital.   The “crisis” Marx predicted, which actually did not come ironically until the early twenty-first century after communism itself had crashed and burned, would be a result, Jameson implied, not so much of the complete “immiseration” of the working class through capitalist expropriation of the value of their labor, but the transmogrification of labor itself into aesthetic trivialities and human consciousness itself into a whirl of  frivolous enjoyments (think mall shopping or cable television), the endless production of new commodified intensities propelled by insatiable sexual appetites (think contemporary art and internet porn),  the raising of compulsive triviality and narcissistic emptiness to the level of the pseudo-sublime (think Facebook).

Jameson wrote in 1991:  “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.”  The “occupy” movement that has gained so much attention lately, like the Wall Street bankers themselves, therefore is  simply one more node in the vast global net of signifying differentia, as Ferdinand de Saussure, who along with Nietzsche birthed postmodern thinking, would have put it.  Saussure in many ways sketched out the theory of the hyperreal in his Course in General Linguistics given at the University of Geneva on the eve of World War I.   Jacques Lacan, who influenced a whole generation of French postmodern philosophers, put it into practice with his analysis of how what he called the “symbolic order” – the order of linguistic and conceptual sign interactions – not only dominates, but absorbs all our desires and imaginings.   

In postmodern culture the endless thirst for the “latest and newest” French thinker  - the proverbial haut couture splashy intellectual “fashion model” with the trendiest, most recent, most outrageous position, or proposition,  to come down the publishers’ runway – is but one manifestation of such developments.    In pop Christianity it is the rage for an ever sexier way of making Jesus seem cool and relevant.  Jesus, the historical singularity that fused the infinite Lord of time with the finite depravity of humanity, is now just an inexhaustibly mobile Lacanian “sliding signifier” in the global marketplace of commodified Christianities.

But let us return to Freud.   As the slow motion apocalypse of the global system of empty significations (i.e., “late capitalism”) gathers momentum, hunger returns.    Not only the hunger for food, but the hunger for significations that are not hyperrealities, that are not pure differentia.  A hunger for a meaningfulness that is truly transformative and “sustainable”.  Aha, say the salivating cyberevangelists, now let’s give them Jesus.  But Jesus himself condemned the Pharisees for offering hungry men snakes and stones.  We can no longer give hungry men and women Saussurian signs.   

Just as we all suffer from so many environmental disorders because of the pollution of our bodies with additives, industrial chemicals, and waste products that we can no longer even define, so we pollute our spirits with the subtle hyperrealities we have no idea are no longer real at all.  The love of God satisfies the hunger and environmental hysteria of the postmodern soul, but it is a love that does not come through the endless natterings of the “symbolic order,” let alone the political as well as the religious preachers of completely virtualized fantasies of a new heaven and earth, of a redemption that can be carried out through out through social media theater, through nothing but private and collective gestures, posturing,  or signifying inanities. 

The apocalypse that is at hand is the apocalypse of a real God who really loves us and really loves through the real love that we show in deeds rather than our gestures, our placing of our hearts along with our bodies in the space of those who desire love, who desire intimacy, closeness, and relationship.  The love of God is inseparable from the love of neighbor (and even more so the love of child, spouse, significant other). 

The second commandment is no Baudrillardian simulacrum.  The true parousia of Christ (“Behold, I am coming soon”) is not “deferred” Derridean avenir.   

Hunger and love.  The real is relational and the relational is real.   It is NOW!

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.  He writes regularly on religion, Christianity, culture, and postmodernism.  He is the author of The Next Reformation (Baker Academic, 2004`) and GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  His latest book Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event will be published by University of Virginia Press in 2012.

The Liturgical Turn: Worshiping Among The Chaos

Earlier this week, David Gelernter posted a really good article over at Big Questions Online that caught my attention. It did so because I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, who works as an aerodynamicist for a major NASCAR team, that centered on the relationship of entropy to eschatology.  That is, if the world is subject to disorder and decay (Romans 8:20, yes I understand that there is much more to that verse) then what does that mean for the new creation? 

Anyway, Gelernter argues that “the rituals we perform teach [us] more than the Second Law [of Thermodynamics]: they teach us to defy the Second Law.” It does this by having a constant theme in the midst of a seemingly shapeless system.  That theme, in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, is separation.  He argues that separation defies nature by defying death.  Which I take, for him, is the great equilibrium toward which all chaos runs. 

It’s a really good post, but I’d like to go further by saying that worship / liturgy / ritual is much more than simply drawing a defiant line in the sand.  In worship we participate in the overcoming of chaos; the new creation in the making. 

 

The liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh argues that in worship we are regularly brought to the “edge of chaos” resulting in “deep change” in the lives of the participants.  These changes or “adjustments” are sometimes obvious and sometimes imperceptible, but the fact is that the worshiping community leaves differently than it was before.  Like the Spirit that brought form out of chaos, through baptism brings new life out of chaos, the Spirit brings a new creation through worship.  This is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.”[1] In fact this is the task of the Church and what happens ultimately in liturgy.           

Kavanagh goes on to suggest that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places where ideas were formed and arts were made.  With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned and no longer seen in reference to the world.  The church, he suggests, offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city.  Kavanagh suggests that the Church because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.”[2]  In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ.  The church’s task is that of the reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world. And more so, to be the embodiment in the world of the world to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. What he calls the “church doing world” or enacting a “normal” world as opposed the abnormality of a chaotic world. I would argue that the normal world is not subject to chaos, (but I could be convinced otherwise).

In Political Worship, Oxford theologian, Bernd Wannenwetsch takes up this notion of the church offering a redeemed world through its liturgy. He suggests that through the liturgy we see a “double becoming of the world.”[3]. The first is the negative becoming, distinguishing the world in a post-lapsarian sense from a good creation, and recognizes itself as that which does not worship God.[4] The second, is a positive becoming of the world, which follows from the first and has real political significance.  Insofar as worship shows the world its sinfulness, it “simultaneously makes it possible for the world to find a different kind of self-understanding, a new identity.”[5]  This new understanding is that the world is bound to the church’s worship as that which produces it.  It causes the world to rightly order itself in order to make space for the church to be the church.  Without doing so the world ceases to be itself.  He notes that this does not cause the world to become the church, but allows it to become “the world which is no longer hostile to God and now reflects the Creator’s original will.”[6] 

There are differences between Kavanagh and Wannenwetsch.  The former wants to say that the ‘world’ that is done is the church’s worship, whereas the latter wants to talk about the ontological world and its reordering that “springs” from the worship. For my purposes, I think they both help us see a fuller picture of what is going on when a (specifically Christian) community worships. It witnesses and participates in the new creation which (among other things) overcomes chaos with goodness and order. 

I suppose it could be argued that order and chaos don’t necessary equal goodness and badness respectively.  But in response to Gelernter, if chaos is defied in liturgy, why not go further and show how it is overcome it?  Perhaps it comes down to the difference between a Jewish and Christian eschatology?

---

[1] Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, p. 50.

[2] Ibid., p. 42. 

[3] Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christians, trans. Margret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003), p. 247.

[4] Ibid., p. 248.

[5] Ibid., p. 249.

[6] Ibid.

Specters of Rage in an Age of Change - Sloterdijk and the "End" of the Postmodern

Multiple Specters

Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx's well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a "specter is stalking" us. It was this same "specter" that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce first the "political", then the "religious" turn.  It is from this particular "turn" that so much theological pomo derives.      

Another specter, however, today is haunting postmodern religious thought itself.  It is the specter of irrelevance. Or better yet - the specter of an irrelevance nurtured, especially in America by faddism, mindless Francophilia, and academic navel-gazing.  As recently as two decades ago Christian thinkers shied away from postmodern philosophy because of the silly and groundless canard that it was "nihilistic", or that it was noxiously inhospitable to "faith" (if you were conservative) or "social action" (if you were liberal).  

Today most educated Christian scholars have probably read the entire postmodern "canon" from Derrida's Writing and Difference to Zizek and Milbank's Monstrosity of Christ.  That you can take courses with the same basic reading list in contemporary theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School tells you how times have changed, does it not?  

But Nietzsche's underlying point in most of his late career tirades that when things have ripened over time they become essentially wormy at the core does not should not be overlooked when it comes to postmodernism itself.  Nietzsche understood that even his own future legacy, which so much of postmodernism happens to be, would not be immune from the same kind of jeremiads he hurled at his own generation.  I myself, as someone who for more than thirty years has crawled along like some tiny, clueless gnat on the vast spherical surface of this gigantic and now multi-generational, slowly ripening, pomo passion fruit, acknowledge this fact with a certain nostalgia of loss, if not a very un-Derridean Angst about what is avenir.  Christian academics, evangelical and mainstream alike, were slow to jump on the postmodernist bandwagon, and they will be probably be just as reluctant to climb off.     

It is not simply a matter of philosophy - and theology for that matter - "painting its gray on gray," as Hegel famously described the end of a theoretical epoch.  Nor is it merely an effect of the scholastic haute monde wearily deciding that "time's up," and summoning the taste-setters and market makers to define the next great thing. Intellectual fashions, unlike whatever is worn by runway models, don't come about that way.  Furthermore, the legacy of the "high postmodern" will not fade away.  It will most likely be aufgehoben in the same way as structuralism, phenomenology, Freudianism, ordinary language philosophy, and existentialism were all folded into and "taken up" into the "post-structuralist" revolution of the 1970s that came somewhat later to be named postmodernism.  

Major shifts and sea changes are more a matter of a widespread changing focus that recognizes how patterns and networks of ideas tended to be embedded in an underlying social and cultural reality, and that this reality is now somehow missing.  They arise from the dim, but unavoidable, awareness that these ideas have now been gradually hollowed out through both overuse and an altered context.  They are in their "twilight," as Nietzsche put it, and it is in such crepuscular times that the thinker begins to test the idols, to tap them to see if they are solid, and force into the open certain questions that one's contemporaries remain uncomfortable asking.  That is what Nietzsche really meant by philosophizing "with a hammer."  It is similar also to what Heidegger meant when he wrote during the 1930s that the philosopher announces how "all the gods have fled" and one must wait for der letzte Gott ("the last God") to "pass", as he said in his Beiträge ("Contributions").

The Times They Are A'Changing

Yet a shift is on, and in many ways it is eerily similar to the 1930s.  I am not referring merely to what we now call the "Great Recession" that is slowly, like a toxic chemical spill, seeping out of the US where it first happened and spreading slowly, sometimes with indecipherable long-term effects, across the planet.    I am referring to a gathering "great recession" in mood and outlook that has changed the culture of the West and starkly affected the politics of the world's own recent historical pace-setter - the United States. 

If postmodernism , in hindsight, looks more like the happy, playful, effervescent, and disseminative "superstructure" (in classic Marxist terminology) of the rising economic and social order of post-70s that came to be termed "neo-liberalism" with its innovative and entrepreneurial energies, hyperindivindualistic ethics, and "post-secular" spiritual and religious proclivities, the era after postmodernism may mirror the pre-1940s preoccupation with issues of social justice, aggregate action and responsibility, and an intellectual confrontation with human complacency, self-deception, and the diverse and competing threats of collective violence against both groups and persons. Reinhold Niebuhr's famous attacks on liberal optimism may have to be brushed off as well.  The familiar political romance of the "just cause" against injustice, shared by "progressives" and neo-conservatives alike that often disguises itself as righteous religious and theological critique, will have to give way to (perhaps even an updated Niebuhrian) to a neo-realism that profoundly recognizes the bankruptcy of both facile certainties and the avante-garde cult of indeterminacy, while at the same time affirming the necessity of conscience, action, and resistance - and the appropriate context for their application and deployment - nurtured by a mature intellectual caution and skepticism of the latest enthusiasm.   .

Which brings us to another specter that is stalking the postmodern - the specter of rage.  The specter of rage historically has always stalked ages that follow upon a sudden and unanticipated collapse of every "proud tower" of collective illusions that were once thought to be the great ideas that animated an age. This particular specter has already hovered routinely around the celebrity status of Slavoy Žižek in the past year or so.  Žižek's own "rock star" image, fostered earlier on through his rhetorical panache with dissecting commonplace issues of pop culture within the framework of Lacanian theory, has more recently tapped into the congenital rage of the American intelligentsia at the outsize global ghoul called "capitalism", especially after the financial crisis of 2008 and the unravelling of economic systems, mainly in America and Europe. Žižek's recent routine summons to reclaim the banner of hard-core revolutionary Marxism a la Lenin, even if such a clamor no longer has any resonance outside of Latin America and perhaps political nostalgia buffs in Russia, in the face of his predicted "end times" collapse of the world economy, is consistent not only with the intellectual Zeitgeist in the West but also with his accompanying fulminations against the post-structuralists and their legacy.  In bad times the self-styled philosophical "bad boy" is all but assured of having an attentive audience.

Rage and History

But there is another, perhaps more telling current of rage, brilliantly diagnosed by another contemporary European "bad boy", the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his recently translated Rage and Time (Columbia University Press, 2010).  Rage and Time is far more thana a somewhat sophisticated commentary on the temper of our own time, even though Sloterdijk himself has gained fame in Germany over the past decade as a controversial television commentator and talk show host. Reaching back all the way to the Greeks, Rage and Time seeks to lay bare the "deep structure" of the modern as well as the postmodern.  

Perhaps a better phrase would be the "deep economy" of things.  "Rage" (Greek=thymos) is the "force" from the heroic age of the Greeks onward, according to Sloterdijk, that "holds the world together."  Rage "preserves in its essence the unity of substance in the multitude of its eruptions.  It exists before all the manifestations and survives unchangingly its most intensive expenditures." (p. 7).  If Christianity with its crucified and unconditionally self-giving deity "removed rage from God" and handed it over to the work of the Devil, the growth of capitalism brought it back in spades.  The "creative destruction" of capitalism, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it, bears a certain resemblance to the wrathful Yahweh of the Bible. It was not accidental that Medieval Christianity denounced competition and acquisitive behavior in the name of a higher morality and divine justice.  

Capitalism was only made possible, according to Sloterdijk, by the "thymotization" of social economies that had previously been made the exclusive prerogative of divine providence.  The supposedly God-ordained, non-competitive order decreed by the Medieval church as both divine and natural law was revealed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a total sham, and became instead a cynical rationale for nobility and clerics to preserve their own special status in an egregiously corrupt order of things.  Even Plato's ideal republic required the thymos of the guardians to keep the state functioning.  The thymos of the ascendant capitalist classes engineered the unravelling of the Medieval fabric, and Weber's newly minted Protestant ethic" ensured what Deleuze would later describes as the "chaosmotic" dynamism of the modern eon, propelled by the violence of history itself and Hegel's celebrated "power of the negative." 

At the same time, capitalism engendered its own thymotic reaction, the revolutionary pushback of the socialist internationale and the dream of a classless society.  It has been the strange dampening of this grand historical rhythm of rage in the late twentieth century, culminating with the "fall" of communism in 1989, that a thymotic economy has been seen as a thing of the past.  The golden age of postmodernism has coincided with this historical solar minimum.  Perhaps in only such an interregnum has been it possible to imagine a "religion without religion" (i.e., a "rageless" religion) or a "messianism without a messiah."  Do not messiahs normally rage and smite against injustice, even if it is deferred rage, the rage of Armageddon?  

We are rapidly coming out of this solar minimum, according to Sloterdijk.  The theological minimalists cry peace, peace, when there is no peace; as Nietzsche might have said; the festival of peace is just a masked ball where in the back drawing rooms rage and resentment primp for their own grand entrance toward the end of the evening. Or, as Sloterdijk writes, "a wrathful God is the great impossible variable of our age.  But what if, beneath the surface, he is working on becoming our contemporary once again?"  (p. 43) Nietzsche could not have said it more efficaciously.   

Sloterdijk as Derrida's Own "Derrida"

Sloterdijk has been around in Germany as long, if not longer, than most of today's well-known postmodern thinkers.  But it is only in the twilight of the postmodern that his star has been suddenly rising.  American academic publishers with the help of the German government are getting ready to crank out a stream of translations of his writings just as the French ministry of culture did for Derrida and Deleuze a generation back.  Ironically, what can be considered Sloterdijk's first mark-making on academic thought outside Germany was his publication of a short book in 2006 (the first edition was actually in French) entitled Derrida: An Egyptian (English edition by Polity Press, 2009).  

That is not to say Sloterdijk offers us a "turn" beyond the postmodern.  Our era is not so much a turn as an "end" in the same sense that both Hegel and Heidegger used the word in talking about the "end of philosophy," and which I myself adapted in publishing the inaugural text of American postmodern religious thought entitled The End of Theology in 1979. An "end" in this connection constitutes a fruition rather than a termination, a fulfillment and maturation of thought trajectories that can now be redirected through new and equally productive strategies.  Early "deconstruction" was thus the "end" of phenomenology and the philosophy of language in this sense. Speech and Phenomena, Derrida's fascinating prolegomenon to deconstruction that is unfortunately seldom read any more, harbors all the indices. Sloterdijk does something totally un-Derridean with Derrida - he takes him to a new level.  In that respect Sloterdijk can be seen as Derrida's own "Derrida," mimicking in many ways Derrida's relationship to Heidegger.  

As a tribute to Derrida upon his death - especially the Derrida that has never really been known or acknowledged in the U.S.  - Sloterdijik's Derrida: An Egyptian is most telling, because it goes back to the latter's "pre-theological" sources in the essays of the 1960s and argues pithily that something was going on there that "immortalizes" what deconstruction was all about in the first place.  On the death of a great thinker this moment of immortalization both preserves, but also sets in motion the next great trend or wave. Sloterdijk ingeniously compares Derrida to Moses, so far as Freud was concerned in Moses and Monotheism.  

If Mosaic Judaism ultimately "historicized" as well as democratized Pharonic immortality in making the "pyramid" nomadic and mobile in the form of the ark of the covenant containing the stone tablets of Torah, Derridean deconstruction perhaps has served to pyramidize the Torah-like reading and re-reading of texts as a way of archiving the history of philosophy.  Derrida's "aporia", therefore, is not really "Jew-Greek", but "Egyptian-Jew," according to Sloterdijk.  There is no more Graeco-form "essential" meaning of the text.  There is only the strange immortality that comes from its endless de-construction and de-positioning with trace-like "deposits" of its signs.  Deconstruction was the new postmodern way back into philosophy, as Heidegger himself had sought to accomplish, if only on his own terms.  

Spectral Excess

Deconstruction created at the same time its own tensive cultural and intellectual "economy" that brought about an ever-broadening and hyperkinetic play of previously pyramidized, "traditional" significations which, if we follow this analysis beyond Sloterdijk's own somewhat technical philosophical reading, were mirrored in the post-1989 expansion of the global consumer economy.    This play of cultural signs was largely new media-driven. It was truly Jean Baudrillard's "hyperreality," fostering a seemingly limitless and purely semiotic economy of consumption and excess, guaranteed with a kind of romantic moral mandate pressed by the already comfortable, but hypercritical Western intelligentsia to disseminate the infinite, generative, substanceless surplus to every corner of the globe.  

That intoxicating sense of a burgeoning, real-life, global economy of excess, of course, was what Georges Bataille had lionized at the height of 1930s austerity and what neo-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had described in their book Empire as the "ripe" set of condition for a new and final "proleterian" revolution of the wage-liberated, culturally enfranchised at the turn of the millennium.  Hardt and Negri were simply the left-wing Tweedle Dums of the neo-liberals and neo-cons, prophesying an equally wrong version of Francis Fukayama's "end of history."  

It was this infatuation with excess, however (not so much the policies of either the Clinton or George Bush administrations), that led to the Götterdämmerung of the global economy in 2008, according to economist Raghuram Rajan in his recently published book Fault Lines (Princeton University Press, 2010).  Rajan, by the way, was one of the few economists to predict the 2008 collapse.  At the conclusion he writes that "progressives in the United States blame the bankers, while conservatives blame the government and the Federal Reserve.  The worrying reality is that both are to blame." (p. 228)  

Both are to blame because hyperidealized models of predicted economic performance that came from both free-market conservatives (so-called "supply siders") and the apostles of government intervention, regulation, and stimulus (the current Obama administration team) have led equally to disaster.  Both, if we follow Rajan's logic, can be attributed to what he calls the myth of "arm's length" relationships between economic players, where Deleuze's "desiring machines" are more than a kind of Weberian "ideal type" (as they actually seemed to be for the philosopher himself), but the signifying processes born of the very generative grammar of theory itself that seem to take on the curious semblance of sentient embodiment.  

It was this Golem-like transformation of theory into both politics and policy, which could only happen during a profligate planetary regime of conceptual errancy and excess - a true Bataillean economy gone mainstream.  In the economic sphere both monetarists and Keysians turn out to be fellow-travelers on the same ship of fools. As Rajan points out, the true "moral hazard" was never really the bank bailouts, mainly because the same systemic hazard can be traced to the total sublimation of investment, risk, and the seemingly boundless expansion of the capacity for consumption summed up in Alan Greenspan's memorable phrase of the 1990s - "irrational exuberance."  

As Rajan points out, however, there was nothing "irrational" about the economic expansion.  It went "unregulated" because the underlying econometric metaphysics of excess demanded it.  There was also a deep, moral, "categorical imperative" behind the expansion.  Thou shalt consume, and thou shalt be oblivious to the consequences, because justice demands it.  There shall be no more any such thing as privilege and marginality, as gain and loss, as winners and losers, so to speak.  We have now entered a truly win-win world. The "revolutionary" economy of each according to his abilities and each according to his needs is founded overthrows the "economy" of scarcity, which is what economics is all about in the first place.  The economy of excess was in vitro designed to abolish "economics" as we know it.  No more "dismal science," only liberty and justice for all! 

Such a hyperconsumptive "meta-economy" followed its own self-propelled trajectory of a new "exuberant" rationality based on the postmodern productivity of the sign process.  Technically speaking, this hyperreal economy was postulated on what a philosopher such as Alain Badiou identifies as the confusion between the virtual and the potential.  The virtual is infinitely productive of significations, and hence is - as I have lately argued - the "event horizon" of the religious.  But virtuality is not the same as potentiality. Potentiality inhabits matter, as Aristotle underscored, not form.  It was this underlying confusion of the formal and the material, the virtual and the potential, the signification and the signified (a confusion first found in DeSaussure) that has enabled both the end and the "material" crisis of the postmodern.

Is Rage the New "Rage"?

It is that peculiar sense of material crisis that animates Sloterdijk's most recent work. Rage economies, in accordance with Sloterdijk's philosophical modus operandi so to speak, are woven from the threads of disjunctions in the sign-process rather than the processes themselves.  They are fashioned from the    lesions that make up Žižek's "barred" subject, incised from the episodic events of the Real.   But unlike these events, which remain in Žižek's neo-Lacanian analysis mere fractures in an otherwise continuous "dialectical" economy, the inscriptions of trauma are stored in an underlying "rage bank" that invests in the various economies of resentment and revolt.  

Unlike Žižek, Sloterdijk is not at all impressed with Marxism, and therefore fails also to be entranced with the enduring academic fantasy of a raging worldwide proletariat, which he understands has sunk beneath the waves of history. Today's rage bankers are investing far more productively in the vengeful mobilization of traumatized collectivities who still bear memories of having been an erstwhile "universal class", whose seemingly seamless imagination, perhaps even in their lifetimes.  The new jihadist Muslim internationale is one illustration he profiles.  Another one, not yet perhaps on his radar, is the current "Tea Party"ism of the new, disenfranchised, American middle class.  But these are not really postmodern phenomena at all. Sloterdijk, in contrast with Derrida, does not view Muslim jihadism as a "return of religion,"  but as the "thymotization" - and hence the historicization - of what was previously simply the play of signs.  They are significations not in their own right, but symptoms of profound trauma.  They are indicators of the end of the postmodern.  

In his 2009 interview with the German national magazine Der Spiegel, Sloterdijk characterizes what the publication's editors call the Eingeweide ("viscera", "embowelment") of today's Zeitgeist.  The editors did not intentionally perhaps suggest through the title that Sloterdijk's philosophy of rage is the "dirty" essence of today's disenchanted politics - the term is employed more in the sense of the "guts" of the issue.  But Sloterdijk, who uses the platform to criticize the European welfare state from the standpoint of a "lifelong social democrat," makes the broad point that the dysfunctionality of the system can only be addressed by an appeal to the implicit "generous" virtues of our thoroughly thymotic culture.  In other words, "forced" taxation and redistribution only leads to evasion, criminality, and narcissistic self-seeking, which hides behind the grand illusions of state-supported architectures of "social justice".  In true Nietzschean (whom Sloterdijk routinely quotes) he calls attention to the current global crisis as a kind of apocalypse of ressentiment brought about the toxic involution of the will to power of inherently self-seeking consumerist individuals masquerading as champions of compassion.  

Sloterdijk's analysis is neither comforting nor encouraging.  It is not one more recipe for the appropriation of contemporary philosophy by the Christian conscience.  But neither was Nietzsche's.  It just happens to be philosophically provocative enough to ask questions in this Indian summer of avant-garde enthusiasms that we have never asked before.     

              

      

Do we really get Romans? A little Badiou and Žižek can help.

It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans.

That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."   

It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic commentator "burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians."  Barth's leveraging of Paul's argument in Romans served, in the shocking aftermath and disillusionment of the First World War, to turn the scholarly, cozy, and complex arguments of 19th century Protestant thinkers on their head and usher in the relatively long era that we today know as Neo-Orthodoxy.

The long-tenured regime of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed - quite quickly really - in the mid-to-late 1960s with the cultural revolution of that period, which coincided with the rise of both religious studies as an "alternative", at least in America, to the intellectual cartel of Barthianism and the Barth-based mainline Protestant establishment and the emergence of so-called "secular theology," which gradually morphed into a new establishment with its own signature and features.  Much of today's Christian postmodernism has this latter development as both its source and heritage, although it is also fair to say that its initial impulse in the form of applied Derrideanism was derived from the sense of a thoroughgoing "gappiness" in conventional liberal constructions of God along with the realization that there was room for postulating a "holiness" that could be glimpsed in all the holes of the not-so-monolithic text.  That is the genealogy of all "religion without religion."

Secular theologies, whether they be grounded in the grand narratives of 19th century bourgeois progressivism or the "apocalypse now" and "destruction of metaphysics" themes of the post-Sixties decades, are always the products of good economic times and social stability.  The varieties of "crisis" theology" - the original terminology for Neo-Orthodoxy - find fertile soil in political or economic anxiety and social upheaval.   All the current discussion of what may be coming "after postmodernism" may be setting the stage for the emergence of a 21st century crisis theology, though one completely and obviously unlike what reigned from the 1930 up to the 1960s.   

Besides Romans, crisis theologies - if that's really the word we want to use - always turn out to carry the genetics of a previous and hitherto marginalized philosophical movement.  Luther relied indirectly on nominalism for his critique of Thomism, indulgences, and Catholic sacramental theology.  Barth "discovered" Kierkegaard.  If a new crisis theology is in the making - most likely with its own re-appropriation of Romans - what might that be?  

The word "postmodern," as we have known for years, carries way too much freight if it is to be intelligible in a serious philosophical or theological setting.  The term itself was deployed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge during the mid-1980s to provide a label for the Zeitgeist of the time, although it has been applied a bit retroactively to the thought of the early Derrida and proleptically to much in the history of philosophy since then.  The feeling that "postmodernism" is now slowly fading from the picture may have more to do with a general weariness in the face of our recent past, not to mention a growing recognition that things have significantly changed in the past few years. One needs, however, to put aside the strife over labels and ask what is happening on the broader intellectual, philosophical, and theological levels.  

There has been a larger major trend since the late 1990s in Continental philosophy, especially on the French side, that has not yet gained traction in the American theological world which may be the key to the beginnings of a new "crisis theology."  The trend is closely associated with the prevalence of two special words nowadays in our postmodernist discourse - "singularity" and "event."  The nomenclature on the main can be traced back to the writings of Gilles Deleuze (though ultimately as far back as the middle and late Heidegger) But these words have become staples in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoy Žižek. 

Without delving extensively into the technical usage of these words in postmodern philosophy, we can make the general observation that they focus our attention on the productive power of certain nameable "phenomena" in our struggle to signify the unsignifiable. Events are "singular" incidences within our narratives and articulations of what we experience that have both broad-ranging origins and consequences, though we cannot "say exactly" what the event is "all about."   The singularity of the event both derives, and derives from,  chains, complexes, and assemblages of potentially meaningful, yet inherently indiscernible, moments of signification that run invisibly back into the past and forward into the future.  The event itself, however, is unnameable.  

Deleuze talked about the singularity of the event in terms of what he called the "virtual."  This kind of talk has deep affinities with the stock, but non-mathematical, language of theoretical physics - e.g., virtual particles, virtual states.  The event, however, is unnameable.  The visible phenomenon, which from Husserl through Heidegger to contemporary "phenomenological" theologians such as Nancy and Marion, can be named by philosophy.  But the event itself surpasses the horizon of everything that is even potentially nameable.   Just as "black holes" in physics are "singularities" with their own "event horizons" that point, without signifying, beyond the laws of nature, so events in the philosophical sense indicate, without naming, beyond the horizon of our syntax and linguistic iterability.

For Žižek the event can be associated with the irruption of the "real" in the endless, but futile, formation of the psychological subject.  For Badiou the event is always identifiable and locatable, yet not "explicable," within history.  It is a "singular truth" that cannot be achieved by philosophical discussion and controversy, yet arises as a surprising and fruitful breakage within the perceived "flow of events" to be seized by thought, which then makes it meaningful through the rigorous application of "truth procedures."

For most post-Sixties French intellectuals the genuine event - l'eventement as Badiou and others call it - was the sudden and fateful inbreaking of the student protests, worker strikes, and the crisis of the Gaullist state in 1968.  For America - at least in recent memory - it might be considered 9/11.  In one's own life, if we go with Žižek's take, the event can be a breakdown of all the cognitive and the "symbolic" routines of processing our experience in accordance with our own personal imago  that we suddenly name as a collapse or "failure" in the generation of a sense of selfhood.  From the Christian point of view the latter is close to the unexpected profound awareness of brokenness and the need of grace.  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me."  And so forth.  The event is the moment of "crisis" and redemption that has ramifications far beyond its own horizon of nameability. 

But what does all the foregoing have to do with theology? Much of the appeal of the earlier version of crisis theology rested on its unabashed Biblicism as well as the implicit cry of "back to the Reformation," where shibboleths like sole fide and sola scriptura resonated strongly with the fast-growing, implicit critique of secular authority.  If we are living in a time of religion's return, we are also witnessing a rapid collapse of confidence, not just in America but throughout much of the Western world, in political and secular authority.  Some kind of "Biblicism" - because of the intrinsically iconoclastic register of the Biblical canon itself, which elevates the singularity of the ancient Judaic faith experience over the would-be universality of the Greek sophrosyne or the Latin ratio, the principle of measured and "enlightened" thought in keeping with harmonious living that supposedly is a mandate for all human beings.

The Pauline indictment of such "measured thought" is most concentrated in his dialectic of "wisdom" and "foolishness", or "vanity", that are found in Romans.  The same dialectic, of course, appears in l Corinthians.   "For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking...Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." (Rom. 1:21-23).  

This kind of dialectic is very familiar to theologians, but what remains unspoken is the implications of Paul's repeated use of variants on the Greek term mataioites (those things that are "futile" or "vain").  The Greek word commonly suggests idolatry, but it has the primary meaning of "lacking force" or "unproductive of sense".  In other words, Paul is contrasting the emptiness or fecklessness of Greek dianoia, or discursivity, which from Plato onward was supposed to lead under the direction of sophia (i.e., "wisdom") to the pure eidetic, or ideal, vision of universal truth.  The dianoia of philosophy, which yields a specious wisdom, results in what Nietzsche termed nihilism, the "twilight of the idols." "What does nihilism mean?  That the highest values devaluate themselves.  The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." (Will to Power, 2).      

In contrast, Paul goes on throughout the rest of Romans to explicate the mystery of the Cross, the importance of what he calls the "obedience of faith" in the gospel that is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom. 1:16)," and the subtle and rather complicated of the relationship between the Jews, "entrusted with the oracles of God", and the role of Christ followers.  What makes Christians special?  It is not that they have a "knowledge"  of God (gnosis), which is reserved for the "Greeks", or a special relationship to God through the Torah, which is reserved for the Jews.  The "obedience of faith" specific to Christians consists in a complete re-orientation of our lives and the formation of our hopes around a once-and-for all event, the event for which the horizon is Christ death and resurrection.  This event can be discerned neither through sophrosyne, which leads to futility, nor as part of the (Jewish) awareness of one's own distinctive election in the economy of God's Heilsgeschichte, which leads to "boasting" and arrogance.  It can only be discerned through the "weakness" (astheneia) of both our philosophical and religious understanding that finds the Cross intelligible only as a pure singularity that remains otherwise impervious to the inferential capacity of our computative minds (dianoia).  "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Cor. 1:23)

For the event Paul, of course, employs the term kairos to indicate this singular and infinitely productive event, which can never be named per se.  "For while we were still weak, at the right time (kata kairon) Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6).   The kairotic character of the event is only perceptible to the "weak", who experience overwhelming "power" while right-minded Greeks sense futility and conscientious Jews a total humiliation, which was the Roman aim in crucifying their victims.  A crucified messiah?  How absolutely insulting to the divine majesty!  Indeed, the Cross signifies not just abject failure, but absolute nihilism so far as Western "ontology" is concerned.  "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not (ta me onta), to reduce to nothing things that are."  On the face of it, what Paul is saying is the most shocking thing that the "onto-theological" version of Christianity can beard - God himself is the author of a strategic historical nihilism that is totally necessary to reveal the "power of the Gospel" in all its fullness and immensity.  

The fascination of today's would-be "atheistic" French philosophers like Žižek and Badiou with the singularity of the crucified Christ is not accidental.  So much of postmodern thought is not merely an "overcoming of metaphysics" and ontology, but a quest to penetrate to the singularity that is neither logical, ethical, nor ontological, but (as Heidegger would put it) the "origin" of the intelligibly determinative. Beginning with Heidegger himself, whom Derrida never really understood and who inaugurated the quest itself, we find a struggling to find some kind of "name" for this origin.  Heidegger calls it the "Being" that can "be" only by crossing it out.  Derrida names it khora, Deleuze the virtual, Badiou the event.  It is a quest for the name of the origin of the "universal."  As Badiou the  tells us, however, the event can be discerned, though not named, in the very "name" of Jesus - not the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Christology qua onto-theology, but the event to which we give that name, and from which all names emanate.  "He is the name for what happens to us universally" (Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60).  

A "crisis theology" would be concurrent with a new explication of the original sense of the Christ event. But postmodern thinking has already brought us to that crisis.

Hence, we need to re-read Romans. 

Carl Raschke

          

 

 

 

        

Ecclesiology as a Rival "Ascetic" of Desire

(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes.  And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version)

Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation.  Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh, Reinhard Hütter, Daniel Bell, Vincent Miller, Stephen Long etc, I have come to three understandings about how late capitalist markets function:

1) The market is a form of "ascetic" practice, disciplining our bodies and inducting us with habits and practices in contrast with ecclesial practices.

2) The market then sets up patters of desire through these ascetic practices in contrast to the church in its ecclesial forms and worship and orients us around desire.

3) That comes together in embodiment and social relationship, and individually around desire, of how the market makes a false form of universal communion.

Cavanaugh, Miller, Wannenwetsch et al, have set up an inherently conflictual and rival relationship between the church and the market.  Within these accounts the problem is they present an over dichotomized account.

What ways might we respond to this?  One way I would suggest is a more nuanced reading, and Augustinian reading of the condition of modernity as a saeculum.  
 
A large question I am asking is if an Augustinian reformed account of a missional ecclesiology in relation to capitalism can be made. 

Fundamentalist Inversions: Some Postmodern Variants

I want to put on the table some recent inversions of fundamentalism expressed under the guise of postmodern re-alignments.  By fundamentalism I'm referring to the Christian fundamentalism created in the wake of the modernist debates in the US around the 1920 (a fun genealogy is here), not fundamentalism in 'general' if there is such of thing.  I want to speak about three specific invesions of fundamentalism regarding inerrancy, biblical primitivism, and anti-intellectualism. 

From inerrancy to pure errancy:
This has been around for awhile so I won't spend too much time on it.  From an ideological commitment to inerrant orginal documents which contain the word of God comes the inversion of the pure errancy of the Bible.  By errancy I don't mean full of errors (although that might be claimed also), but rather that scripture is mark as errant, as somewhat lost, or at least meandering, never quite landing anywhere, that there is no cohesive theme, plot, narrative, or character.  Rather than a legal document we should think of the Bible as a communal library (McLaren's new proposal).  I think this inversion is the triumph of a certain hermeneutics deployed against modern literalism.  And as such is merely an inversion of fundamentalism, rather than a break or overcoming.

From biblical primitivism to rabbinic primitivism:
Old time fundamentalists always want to get back to the beginning, to return to what the Bible said and just do it.  Who wants to be an Acts 2 church?  The inversion of this, I submit, is a return/recovery of rabbinic primitivism.  As the story goes, because the church became so thoroughly Hellenized so quickly (just see the Gospel of John) the only way back into an authentic Jewish mindset reflecting that of Jesus is to look at early rabbinic Judaism, circa 120 C.E, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Hebrew midrash, mystical uncertainty, the dissemination of the Torah without a final interpretation, even by God, all of these are taken as a better way of believing/knowing/living with Jesus on his way, rather than the orthodox of Greek thought forms.

On one level, I have nothing against any of these and I think indeed they might help us in a life of faith.  But the only problem is that rabbinic Judaism was already itself a reactionary movement against an already Hellenized Judaism, and secondly, to use it as an interpretative devise for authentic Christianity is to join Enlightenment racism started over 200 years ago.  Let me explain.  The Apostle Paul was not such a strange mixture of Greek and Hebrew culture as so often portrayed.  He was rather the more typical expression of Diaspora Judaism of the time.  While Philo was a particularly spectacular attempt to harmonize the Torah with Plato, when you look at the intertestimental literature (of course the Septuagint, but also the Wisdom of Solomon, The Book of Enoch, Baruch, etc) your see various assimilations of Greek throught via wisdom and apocalyptic literature.  Certainly I'm not saying it was monolithic in nature, but Hellenistic influences were already prevelant well before Jesus came on the stage, even if they weren't as dominant in Palastine as they were outside it.  But secondly, the attempt to find a primitive expression of Judaism through which to funnel Christian theology, which on the surface seems very open and welcoming to Judaism (which I would advocate), it inadvertently falls into a line of thought which began as anti-Semitic polemics (see Dale B. Martin, “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question,” in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism divide).  As we all know, the Renassaince and Enlightenment idealized ancient Greece (its art, culture, politics).  This created a mirror through which to view the problems/solutions of European cultural, and the foil for this became a backwards Judaic thought.  Two intellectual  poles were created for understanding thought, religions, politics, and society: the Greek and Hebrew.  We have been oscillating back and for between the two poles ever since.  Now I could go on about this, but suffice to say that I'm not convinced this is the best way forward (recovering a primitive rabbinic Judaism) because while definitely worthy as a way of life, I just don't think it will help us better understand the origins of Christianity, just like getting back to Acts is no good.   So, let's avoid this primitivist inversion.

From conservative anti-intellectualism to liberal anti-intellectualism:
This one has me the most frustrated.  I was drawn to the emerging church conversation because I saw vigorous questioning and thoughtful exploration.  And I certainly don't mind disagreements over quesitons and answers. And certainly there are several young, postmodern emerging/emergent theologians who are making rigorous arguments and thoughtful claims.  But I've become more and more concerned at a creeping anti-intellectualism among some of the loudest voices who rest on rhetorical questions, anecdotal evidence, and communal experiences over philosophical and theological articulation and argument.  This, I believe, follows from the previous inversions because your don't have to really say anything or land anywhere because we are all merely in an endless conversation.  Essentially, everything is a rhetorical display without any real substance.  And really, you can only score so many rhetorical points before you are only preaching to the choir (which is a form a fundamentalism itself, is it not?).  I have been a part of numerous conversations that only go so deep before an implied anti-intellectualism takes over.  If one probes too deeply all of a sudden you are part of the establishment, you are on a heretic hunt, or you are defending an ideology which we are trying to overcome with our radical questioning.  Well, that can only go so far.  When a certain form of radical questioning takes the well worn paths of protestant liberalism, or mirror forms of Hegelianism, it does not good to just assert that "we" aren't doing that old thing, you have to actually show how things are different, you have to defend and articulate what is going on.  This is the role of an 'organic theologian', to both articulate within a community what is happening, and express to larger communities why it makes sense.  To only do the former without the latter is to perpetuate a fundamentalism on the other side of the equation.  Hence my claim of an inverted anti-intellectualism.  Fundamentalist, Evangelicals, Hippies, the Seeker-Church, and now many Missional/Emergent types play this card as a way of calling into question the power of the establishment.  Now I'm not saying there aren't issues of power going on, but have faith in your ideas and practices, show the world, make your case, and make a difference.  Don't just claim that the powers are keeping you out without even actually making an argument so saying that others won't understand.

So, I just wanted to get these out there, that what is thought to be after/beyond fundamentalism might just be its inversion. 

Have any of you experienced this? 

Do any disagree with my typology of what's going on?

---

Geoff Holsclaw is a co-pastor at Life on the Vine, and blogs over at for the time being.

The new German postmodern Christianity - beyond deconstruction

The new German awakening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postmodern Christianity and American anti-authoritarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From deconstruction to "globopomo"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenging comfortable Christian "identity theology"

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

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

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

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

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

Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: A Review

The following review of Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity comes to us from Dr. William Keenan, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University. He has published extensively on aspects of culture and beliefs and is currently engaged in research projects on atheism and on art.

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Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
Ernst Bloch
With an Introduction by Peter Thompson
Translated by J. T. Swann
2009 (July)
288 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 394 0 Ppk
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84467 371 1 Hbk
Price: £55.00

Since its original publication in 1968, Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom has been the book to deal with by any serious quester after knowledge of the deep symbiotic relationship between those über-'Others', Christianity and Atheism. As an unabashed utopian Marxist thinker, Bloch (1885 - 1977) eschews that 'excess of hyper-rationalism or dogmatic materialism' his more prosaic atheist stable mates generally bring to discussions of religion. In the words of Peter Thompson, Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, in his excellent Introduction to this long unavailable classic, 'Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope' (i – xxx, i):

(R)eligion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain.

Bloch himself rubbed shoulders with that unique coterie of enlightened radical Marxists - Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, for example. Perhaps we have the embryo of some such today in Eagleton, Badiou, Žižek, Habermas and others for whom religion-averse aggressive sorts of atheistic fundamentalism are as intellectually uncongenial as the 'exclusively modern phenomenon' (Habermas 2001: 10) of their religion counterparts. Marx's own dialectical understanding of religiosity, captured well in his open-minded insight into 'the opium of the masses, the heart of the heartless world' pervades Bloch's 'detective work', as he himself called it, on the emancipatory – for which, read 'heretical', a favourite Blochian trope – potential within Christianity. Bloch's exegesis of the Bible is an insider's hermeneutic, unlike that verstehen-free religion-cynical spleen of Hitchens, Dawkins, Gray and other high priests of resurgent Darwinism.

For Bloch, scripture is soaked through with hope-filled narratives of transgression that challenge the cold moralistic pieties and hot consumer excessess of the modern world driven by the Puritan ethic and its capitalist manifestations. Not only were Amos, Jeremiah and the psalmists of yore wont to sound war trumpets against greed and godlessness, Christ's life was a continual battle against systematic brutalization, exploitation and hubris, whether incarnated in, for instance, temple-franchised money lenders, pharasaical pride, or denial of the human rights of widows, prostitutes, lepers and the anawim of the earth. Before liberation theology, Bloch was. Before feminists picked up the revolution power in the peasant girl Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, with its promise that the Almighty will 'cast down the mighty from their seats … exalt the humble … send the rich away empty', Bloch was affirming the capacity, inbuilt within humanity since the Creation, to create Kingdom-life now, on earth.

As a thought mode, atheism is commonly understood to be radically different in domain assumptions from 'religion'. '(C)ompeting caliphates', Peter Thompson calls them (xiv). Bloch's approach is deeply imbued with his strong humanistic Marxist conviction that dogmatic forms of both atheism and church-orientated Christianity simply talk past each other in a dialogue of the deaf. His 'utopia of the light', as Bloch refers to it (p. 231), is, to borrow a Habermasian expresison, the 'ideal speech community' of the Enlightenment, not in the 'half-baked' (p. 7) compromised version found in 'rationalistic bourgeoise' (p. 8) contexts that fall short of his messianic vision of full-blooded participatory democracy in which all voices, including religious ones, might be heard and respected. He writes (p. 10): 'The Enlightenment, therefore, will be all the more radical when it does not pour equal scorn on the Bible's all-pervading healthy insight into man.'

Setting aside the somewhat outmoded sexist language in Bloch's expression here and leaving the matter of biblical 'health' to one side, an 'Amen' to that tolerant sentiment seems theologically and politically appropriate when pursuing a sense of atheism in a multi-faith world that would not take the form of an anti-religious knee-jerk reflex. Nevertheless, as we might expect of a believer but not a belonger, Bloch's nuanced analysis imports a pervasive anti-institutional religion refrain: 'the Church is the institution least founded on enlightenment' (p. 9). Bloch's desire for a 'processual' approach to the 'end of alienation', in critique of the 'programmatic' emphases of Heidegger, Bultmann and Barth, is to see 'an end to static metaphysics' (p.54). Writing in 1968, significantly enough, he remains pretty much silent on how the institutionalization of such logocentrism within anti-utopian – read, hope-less – forms of life wherever they be found are to be effectively contested.

Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom is a tough read, made so by the author's intellectual capaciousness and capacity to range cavalierly between the languages of theology, philosophy and critical theory of his times. Perhaps discursive modes, even thought styles, have moved on apace since the post-war period in which Bloch embarked on his courageous adventure to put the best fruits of Christianity and Marxism in the same basket. Though an Index would have been a useful resource in a book of such range and intricacy, the republication of this sparkling study is timely and sure to launch a new wave of interest in bridge-building – or bridge-destruction - either side of the religion-atheism gulf war. Bloch's approach is literary, elusive, lyrical and, at times, a tad, it must be said, lugubrious and long-winded. He does not provide a clear map of a road to reconciliation between Atheism and Christianity, the two great roaring beasts of the modern jungle. But that is not Bloch's intention in any case. Nor does his book necessarly help us re-examine the role of Marxism in the postmodern era. As a 'classic' it is too time bound for that. We need to read it in context. It maybe a tract more for its times than ours.

We do, however, obtain from the book what is of lasting value, namely, a sense that if we look for it we can rediscover within either of the caliphates of religion and atheism redemptive illumination and empowerment. Taken together, as Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom reaches out to do, there is potential for a new world in the making. This is a richly evocative, demanding book to think with about massively important matters at the heart of human culture. In a characteristic Blochian Christo-Marxian, therefore fully, radically dialectical, sentiment (Bloch 2009, p. 166):

(T)here seems to be quite as much love here for the oppressed as there is justice for the evil-doers and salvation for those who have been freed … the same apocalyptic light which shines with anger on the wicked also lights the way to the wedding feast of the elect.

In his novel The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie (2009: 55) has an interesting, ironic take on atheistic colonialization:

'If you were an atheist, Birbal, the emperor challenged his first minister, 'what would you say to the true believers of all the great relgions of the world?' Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly . 'I would say to them that in my opinion they are all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them. 'How so?' the emperor asked' All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal. 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.'

Reference

Habermas, J. (2001) Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp.

Derrida, Kandinsky, and the Force of Art

By Carl Raschke

Deconstruction and the Force of Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kandinsky and the Force of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christian Abstractionism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Slavoj Žižek a Theologian?

Perhaps even asking the question renders meaningless the idea of a post-secular age.  Now it is no longer the theologians versus the secular liberals, nor is it merely a question of secularist making room for religion.  We can't merely designate current theory as post-secular without farther distinguishing how and to way purpose religion has made a return.  But I degress...

Now, of course it goes without saying that Slavoj Žižek has much to say about theology, and even uses theological concepts and codes.  But does that make him a theologian?

My question springs from something Pete Rollins said while describing a reading group he is pulling together which would be "dedicated to introducing and exploring the work of key theorists who are contributing important insights into Christianity."  Now, framed this way, of course I would recommend reading Žižek.  But Rollins introduces Žižek as "a dialectical materialist theologian."  Really?  For me, riffing on the title of this installation piece, I would have to say, "Slavoj Žižek (the theologian) Does not Exist".  

Now I'm sure that many will jump on my intolerant exclusion, my hubristic tendency to police borders and draw lines, my pitiable need for creating Others, Monsters, and Enemies, all of which, they will say, Žižek help us to recognize and overcome.  Well, perhaps. 

But I would counter that by calling Žižek a theologian is to make a huge mistake in either one or two ways.  The first  would be to misunderstand Žižek's project, the other would be to misunderstand theology.  Žižek has been, and it seems always will be, a "fighting atheist" who really does believe that religion in its actual forms, its lived realities (which I hope this site would be about, even if tangentially) is fundamentalist and violent (see he his "Defenders of the Faith" where argues that atheists are the only true practitioners of religion).  For me, Žižek is at his best as a political theorist of ideology practicing a critique of capitalism, and for the most part I choose to walk a great distance with him. But in this way he is functioning as a provocative philosopher (and I'm not saying that while looking down my snobby theological nose).

But the only way to understand Žižek as a theologian is to serious downgrade theology itself, which is the second mistake. If theology is merely the sociology or anthropology of religion run through the Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, then I might as well become a stock broker.  If theology is merely explication of the immanent infinitude of human subjectivity, the void of the cosmos, the height and depth of reality, then let's own up to that (which I believe Žižek has). But if theology is truly about something, someone, transcending reality as we know/perceive/construct it, something, someone, that, yes, stands beyond/above/outside what we can conceive, then it is plain that Žižek is not a theologian, and clearly states as much.  Some version of the latter is what I hope theology is, even in all its apophatic, kataphaic relations, even in all its discursive permutations through the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

For these reasons, for me, Žižek is not a theologian.

What have I missed?  What do you think?