(Ir)religiosity

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Thanks to a new post at The Image of Fish and Tripp Fuller’s suggestion of throwing in some Eberhard Jüngel with my Deleuze, I have been thinking more about the possibility of a theology of inexistence — or better a theopoetics of the hyperreal — and the relationship of the ‘new’ with the ‘old.’ Doing some unrelated work, I ran across a quote from one of the most important passages of Paul Ricoeur‘s The Symbolism of Evil that I think speaks to the importance of beginning at the level of the theological imaginary.

It is in the age when our language has become more precise, more univocal, more technical in a word, more suited to those integral formalization which are called precisely symbolic logic, it is in this age of discourse that we want to recharge our language, that we want to start again from the fullness of language.

That is also a gift of our “modernity,” for we moderns are the heirs of philology, of exegesis, of the phenomenology of religion, of the psychoanalysis of language.  The same epoch holds in reserve both the possibility of emptying language by radically formalizing it and the possibility of filling it anew by reminding itself of the fullest meanings, the most pregnant ones, the ones which are most bound by the presence of the sacred to man [sic].

It is not regret for the sunken Atlantides that animates us, but hope for a re-creation of language.  Beyond the desert of criticism we wish to be called again.

But what the symbol gives rise to is thinking.  After the gift, positing.  The aphorism suggests at the same time that everything has already been said enigmatically and yet that it is always necessary to begin everything and to begin again in the dimension of thinking.  It is this articulation of thought given to itself in the realm of symbols and of thought positing and thinking that constitutes the critical point of our whole enterprise. (349)

This makes me wonder if another way to couch all of this that might help rectify the (false?) opposition of old/new, past/future, present/possibility, etc. is in terms of repetition, of repetition with critical difference.