(Ir)religiosity

Recently, I wrote a paper entitled “Empire, Economics, and the Future: Toward an Incarnational Eschatology”  for a course on Gospel and Empire.  In it I trace the contours of what I believe to be the eschatological narrative tacitly exuded under neoliberal globalization (or, if you like, what Hardt and Negri have famously termed the new, postmodern form of Empire).  I then briefly develop what I call an incarnational eschatology in response to this metanarrative.  It is an eschatology sans telos insofar as telos these days is tantamount to an ahistorical, transcendent and regulative ideal which subsumes, however overt or covert, all difference under its logic (not to mention it prescribes desire and then fabricates various technologies which are supposed to satisfy it).  This eschatology is modeled after the gesture of the incarnation and thus involves a movement down and out, toward the margins.  I claim that faith collectives today must enact a critical repetition of this gesture (in the Kierkegaardian sense) as a means to pierce the seemingly immanent fabric of Empire; to make use of the ambivalences and antagonisms intrinsic to Empire and, concomitantly, to transcend Empire itself, at least partially, with a posture toward the undetermined future, toward that which is, as Derrida likes to put it, “to-come.”

Starting tomorrow I plan to post this paper in its entirety in four or five different sections.  I look forward to the feedback.