(Ir)religiosity

I’m planning to spend a good chunk of the summer researching the critique advanced by both Fredric Jameson and David Harvey of whether postmodernism, in the final instance, simply serves as the “cultural logic” of late capitalism.  In other words, is the preservation of difference and the celebration of alterity implicitly acquiescent to the ambivalent force of the global market?

Hardt and Negri, in Empire, put it this way:

We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake today’s real enemy. What if the modern form of power these critics (and we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no longer holds sway in our society? What if these theorists are so intent on combating the remnants of a past form of domination that they fail to recognize the new form that is looming over them in the present? [...] In this case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule! When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door. (137-38)

And again, even more boldly:

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the ‘‘liberatory’’ weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries. Despite the best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming  arms of the new power. From this perspective the celebratory affirmations of postmodernists can easily appear naive, when not purely mystificatory. (142-43)

I think this critique, perhaps more than others, deserves to be taken seriously.  However, I am reticent to agree with Hardt and Negri (and their forebears, Jameson and Harvey) that returning to some form of (neo/post)marxism is the best answer.  I hear their worry about new forms of domination and sovereignty but I think they ultimately concede to the same type of essentialism they claim to be beyond in arguing that our situation of (postmodern) Empire is wholly pure — history, as they say, never comes with clean edges.  In other words, I do not believe that postmodern and postcolonial discourses are dead in their tracks.  These binaries and “old” versions of domination are still at work as technologies of production, it seems to me, even within more invisible forms of imperialism.

The question I have — which has led me to pursue the research — is whether there are any substantial responses to this criticism in defense of postmodern/postcolonial discourses.

Anyone know?

Conclusion: Critical Repetition

What, then, is the criterion for critical, liberative theo-political praxis today in the face of global neoliberal Empire? It is quite obvious that such an eschatology, reliant on the logic of downturn, involves incarnate bodies but what is its phenomenological structure? In his enigmatic work Repetition, Søren Kierkeegard provides, I claim, a solid heuristic through which an incarnational eschatology can generate critical theo-political praxis by modeling the gesture of the incarnation itself.  For Kierkegaard, repetition is not the simple reproduction of the past as if events could be simple carbon-copies of one another, but rather a means of recollection into the future.  He writes, “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite direction, for what is recollected as been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”¹ For Kierkegaard a true, non-identical repetition, by virtue of the absurd (or the impossible as Derrida would have it), is still open to the singularity of events themselves, yet still rooted in memory, in a recollection of the past.  Repetition is therefore a way of interacting with memory, of remembering, of re-membering, with an eye for the future.  As Slavoj Žižek puts it, this process involves a “repetitive movement of repeating the beginning again and again”² through a process of future-oriented recollection that is fundamentally rooted in the galvanizing memory of past history which becomes intrinsic to the present.  It is in this way that Johann Baptist Metz, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, can speak of the “dangerous memory” of the church, insofar as it serves as a catalyst for critical theo-political praxis, as “the public witness and bearer of the tradition of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ [Empire] of our emancipative society.”³  These memories are dangerous to Empire precisely because they inspire non-identical repetition into the future. In terms of incarnational eschatology this means that, in the face of Empire, one must enact a non-identical repetition of the incarnation.  In other words, this logic of downturn at the heart of an incarnational eschatology involves returning to the beginning once again, not to merely reproduce the past, but to repeat the incarnational gesture down and out toward the margins, toward the victims and the collateral damage of Empire and, in so doing, to the coming reign of God.

The task of the faith collective, then, is to, like Christ, be fully present and incarnate in the world such that the reign of God is being realized in the very presence of the violence of Empire, to be the eschatological sign of the impossible, of that which is “to-come” in the face of totalization and in the very bowels of illegitimate power.  In this way, Žižek provocatively speaks of the incarnation not as an act of sterile emptying of the divine, but an act in which God “identified himself with his own shit”⁴ and through genuine kenotic love for the Other — that is humanity — became fully present in the suffering and anguish of the world — and did so on the fringes of Empire.  In other words, God rolled up God’s sleeves and entered into the muck, the mire, and the messiness of the finite world as the ultimate expression of divine love and the initial inauguration of the reign of God. An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture; here persons are not reliant on the ahistorical other-worldly ideals of Empire but are fully present in the evil and violence of the world, bearing faithful witness to the incoming of the impossible and the advent of divine transcendence which pierces and violates the immanent normalcy of the status quo.  Indeed, rather than an eschatology, one might speak of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology that is so invested in the material world that is it committed to identifying with its own shit, the shit of Empire, of being incarnate amidst the messiness and ordure of the world as the sign of another possible reality that is within yet not fully realized, absent in its very presence, a reality that is always already here yet always already “to-come” in the future, a future which transforms the present and ruptures the mundane.

In the final pages of their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri note the difference between linear chronos time and its unexpected fissure with the arrival of káiros, the moment in which an emancipatory politics is initiated through the ambivalances and antagonisms of Empire.

Káiros is the moment when the arrow is shot by the bowstring, the moment when a decision of action is made.  Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture or clinamen that can create a new world.  […] The bowstring shoots the arrow of a new temporality, inaugurating a new future. […] We can already recognize that today times is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.  In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.   This will be the real political act of love.⁵

It is hard to overlook the theological tone permeating Hardt and Negri’s prose here.  Indeed, their description of the revolutionary future is not at all unlike the hope of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology.  There is, however, a crucial difference — and this is why Kierkegaard notion of repetition is so vitally important.  For theology, the event that Hardt and Negri believe will propel us into the living future as already happened, indeed it was the Christ Event!  We are living and participating in the future of which they speak.  By repeating the gesture of the incarnation, by following the logic of downturn, the theo-political subject lives in the liminal space between what Hardt and Negri call the “dead present” and the “living future,” what Paul calls the already and the not yet, even in the bowels of Empire.  It is in this way that an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology, perhaps more effectively than Hardt and Negri’s multitude, summons the rupture of the present chronos with káiros, of the violation of Empire’s socio-political fabric with the liberative incoming of the reign of God through intentional and tangible movement toward the fringes, toward those the Empire itself has violated…“for such a time as this” (Es. 4:14).

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1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Writings Vol. VI, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. Emphasis mine. [↩]
2. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 87. [↩]
3. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York, New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89-90. [↩]
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 187.  This phrase need not be read as complicit with a negative, essentialist theological anthropology.  Rather it involves reliance on the logic of downturn, a gesture toward the margins where one finds herself wholly present in the world amidst the pain and the mundane, the suffering and the profane.  This does not mean that God created shit to begin with, rather it asserts that wherever shit is there is God siding with those who have no way out.  An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 357-58. [↩]

Incarnational Eschatology: Eschaton sans Telos and the Logic of Downturn

In the preceding two sections, I described both the state of Empire in postmodernity, drawing upon the work of Hardt and Negri, and the ahistorical eschatological narrative imbibed by Empire, best seen in the work of Francis Fukuyama.  In this section, I shall turn to what I believe to be a robust constructive theological alternative to the eschatology of Empire.  Utilizing Rieger’s concept of the logic of downturn and Derrida’s notion of the impossible and absolute future, I will develop an eschatology that is intrinsic to the incarnation and, contra the escapism of both traditional Christian eschatology and the eschatology of Empire, deeply rooted in history and material reality.

“Christian eschatology,” writes Jürgen Moltmann, “must separate itself from the messianism of the modern world, and out of this world’s ruins must rescue the categories of redemption.”¹ From within the superstructure of global capitalism, Christian theology is faced with the public task of critically and consciously constructing a liberative and imaginative eschatology free from the messianism of Empire in all its homogenizing force.  As noted above, one of the hallmarks of Empire eschatology is its ahistorical transcendence, that is its detachment from the immanent place, from the actual affairs of socio-political reality.  As with Fukuyama, Empire can, on the one hand, make absolutist claims about the future and course of history and, in a quasi-theological manner, proclaim good news, on the other.  The future, then, or the eschaton, is enchained and fixed, determined by the present, and subsumed under the ideal and regulating orientation of the status quo.  It is therefore susceptible to ontological and epistemological closure insofar as Empire itself serves as its own transcendental signifier, adopting a posture of hegemonic totalization as the sole arbiter of truth and meaning.² My contention, however, is that Christian eschatology jettisons this determinism and rejects any static or fixed metanarrative.³ To be sure, this is not to say that a liberative eschatology has nothing to say about the future or the course of humanity history, on the contrary it has much to say.  But the crucial difference is that such an eschatology eschews the logic of Empire and the ethos of determinism by claiming that the future, insofar as it is part God’s unfinished and ongoing project of redemption and restoration, remains open and unrestrained by the oppressive ideologies of the present.  Thus, while Jean- François Lyotard might define “the postmodern” as that to which suspicion and incredulity are intrinsic, he also states that it is “as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation.”⁴ There is thus a dual movement of delegitimizing the eschatology of Empire, on the one hand, and the opening, however small or qualified, of the aporetic, of the ambivalent, or what Derrida calls the impossible, on the other.⁵ It is here, in this small fissure in the bulwark of ontological closure and epistemological cessation, that a new eschatology can be resurrected from the underside of Empire.

The crucial initial move that must be made, however, is to separate eschatology proper from teleology, the latter being tantamount to the eschatological trajectory of Empire with all its forms of closure and the former being an open posture toward the unknown future and the in-breaking of the reign of God in the present.  Insofar as Empire points to a fixed and determined ahistorical telos, it is — as far as Christian eschatology is concerned — a “de-eschatologizing” force in that it “ignores the absolute that comes to it from outside itself in order that it be able to realize it in itself” so there is “no future, no next….[since] Empire is defined as eternal.”⁶ Eschatology, then, must unhook itself from the telos and messianism of this false and misguided trajectory such that it allows itself to remain open to coming of the Other, of the realization of an unknown yet fervently anticipated future — to borrow from Derrida, of that which is “to-come.”

[T]he effectivity or actuality of the [promise] will always keep within it, and it must do so, [an] absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.  Awaiting without the horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise….⁷

While Empire may lay monopolizing claims on transcendence, its covert work is unmasked.  For eschatology proper recognizes that true transcendence comes from God qua Other⁸ and literally ruptures the present with the future such that the present is wholly transformed. It is less a strong, well defined decree about the nature of the future as much as it is an opening up to the unknown future, the adopting of a posture of humility in the face of the impossible future that is to come as heaven and earth are fused and God, as John of Patmos and the prophet Isaiah write, will be “making all things new” (Rev. 21:1-5; Is. 65:17). Here divine transcendence pierces the immanent fabric of Empire and irrupts the usual cycles of normalcy.  Transcendence, in this sense, has nothing to do with determinism or other-worldliness as in Empire; rather, it involves tangibly and palpably “transcending a particular form of immanence that is determined by the status quo.”⁹ This liberative form of divine transcendence is the linchpin of an eschatology which seeks to run counter to the fixed and totalizing forces of Empire’s narrative as it provides a means to penetrate its seemingly impervious shields and to therefore transform the present.  As Moltmann puts it in his landmark work A Theology of Hope, Christian eschatology is “forward looking and forward moving and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.”¹⁰ Moreover, contra the Fukuyama thesis, eschatology does not result in the end of history nor is it determined by ahistory.  Again, Moltmann states it quite well:

Eschatology does not disappear into the quicksands of history, but it keeps history moving by its criticism and hope. […] It is neither that history swallows up eschatology nor does eschatology swallow up history. The logos of the eschaton is promise of that which is not yet, and for that reason it makes history. The promise which announces the eschaton, and in which the eschaton announces itself, is the motive power, the mainspring, the driving force and the torture of history.¹¹

A counter-hegmonic eschatology, perhaps more than any other theological loci, provides the impetus for present transformation by virtue of its being unhinged from a determined or definitive telos.  The eschatological horizon, then, is the work of divine transcendence in breaking loose the crusts of normalcy such that the vicissitudes of Empire are met with new, creative forms of resistance and antagonism that anticipate the arrival and realization of the reign of God.  It is an eschatology sans telos insofar as telos is that which is determined and ordered by the structures of Empire.

While this move to delegitimize the eschatological narrative of Empire and construct an alternative eschatology divorced from teleological determinism is an important initial step, it is surely not the only step.  Indeed, such a move alone still consigns eschatology to the realm of transcendence alone albeit of a more open and less fixed variety than that of Empire.  The most important move, however, follows the rupture of the present with the absolute, heterogeneous future and the irruption of Empire’s immanent status quo with divine transcendence and alterity. For if, as Moltmann maintains, “Christian eschatology is at heart Christology in an eschatological perspective,”¹² then an equally liberative understanding of Christ must accompany an understanding of eschatology as that which pierces the fabric of the present with the presence of God’s peaceable reign.  The gesture of the incarnation, I claim, provides the foundation and the internal logic for eschatology.  For if divine transcendence provides the basis upon which the narrative of Empire, given its own internal ambivalences and antagonisms, might be ruptured, then the incarnation provides the impetus for critical liberative social and political praxis against Empire.

Through the incarnation, divine transcendence is rendered immanent¹³ as God not only becomes human, taking on the form of fragile, finite flesh (Jn. 1:14), but becomes a particular kind of human in a particular location in space and time.  Against the throws of Empire, the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who chooses not to be born among the high and powerful but among the lowly and the ordinary at the fringes of the Roman Empire.  It is here, at this location, on the margins, that divine transcendence ruptures the normalcy and immanence of Empire.  As such, the incarnation marks the inauguration of the reign of God, the beginning of the rupture of the heterogeneous incoming of God’s absolute future even in the midst of Empire’s homogenizing totalization.

In Christ, the absolute Other of God is said to enter into the mundane world and set up a home among us. Here God is neither reduced to the world of objects nor remains in some space utterly beyond the world, but rather ruptures the present with the future, fractures the finite with the infinite, and tears through the temporal with the eternal, inhabiting the now in the guise of the not-yet. Here God’s Otherness is no longer located in some eschatological realm beyond the present order of the world but rather in an eschatological realm that infuses the present world, rupturing it and placing it into question. Here the razor sharp cut of God’s kingdom does not presuppose a hairline gap between the present world and the world to come, but rather is that which slices through the present world with the world to come, inhabiting our world with a divine realm that is not reducible to our time and space.¹⁴

Indeed, this razor-sharp edge of God’s topsy-turvy reality cuts through the present — the eschatological immanence of Empire — and literally turns material reality upside down by placing the first last and the last first (Mt. 20:16; Mk. 9:35), by blessing the poor and chastising the rich (Lk. 6:20; 24) and, most of all, by demonstrating that “the least of these” are the very site of the divine (Mt. 25:35).  Joerg Rieger puts it like this: “as the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ turns things upside down, we might say that the incarnation is the logic of downturn.”¹⁵ Whereas the ahistorical eschatology of Empire points to a fixed and determined future, this eschatology — an incarnational eschatology — is rooted in historical reality, it involves corporeal bodies, and, most of all, it is driven by a logic of downturn that is the essence of the incarnation itself, a movement down and out, toward the margins and toward those that are invisible and repressed by the forces of Empire.  As the divine transcendence of God’s absolute future ruptures immanent reality and violently pierces the socio-political fabric of Empire, liberative theo-political praxis is galvanized by the logic of downturn and the move toward the Other at the margins.  As Karl Barth puts it in a line oft neglected by the purveyors of neo-orthodoxy, “God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly, against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.”¹⁶

An incarnational eschatology, then, sides with the vulnerable victims of Empire and, through the logic of downturn, moves toward the margins in hopeful expectation of the in-breaking of the reign of God in history at the site of marginality. Yet, this is not the expectation of that which is completely absent, but the expectation of the coming of that which is already present and within us (Lk. 17:20-21).  To put it in Pauline terms, the reign of God is always already present yet always already absent and anticipated as we stand in between the already and the not-yet of history.  This reality is experienced “not as the absence of something that is to come, but rather the absence of a kingdom that is already here” where the “opening created by the eschatological kingdom of God is not an opening to the future but rather an opening into the present”¹⁷ by virtue of its “not-yet-ness.”  The reign of God is here but not here, present yet absent, already but still “to-come” with the advent of the impossible that is only made possible through one’s participation in the pockets of this reality that are already present in the midst of Empire.

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1. Jürgen Moltmann, God For a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1999), 220. [↩]
2. M. Douglas Meeks (“Economy and the Future of Liberation Theology in North America,” Liberating the Future: God, Mammon, and Theology, ed. Joerg Rieger [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1998], 45) calls this the “market logic” which has “defined the ground of certainty (what can be called true and factual), what can count as the development of human beings and progress of society, and the accepted conceptions or order, rule, justice, reason, harmony, and peace.  This spirit asserts itself in all spheres of sociality and increasingly proves itself as the one universal order of the world.” [↩]
3. Thus when Jean- François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis, Minnesota:  University of Minnesota Press, 1984], xxiv) defines the postmodern condition as that which exhibits deep “incredulity toward metanarratives,” I do not believe the horizon for Christian eschatology is destroyed.  It would seem, rather, that such a condition spells the end of the eschatology of Empire writ large, finding it wholly lacking in legitimization. [↩]
4. Ibid., xxiv.  He continues adding, “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? […] Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principles is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy,” xxiv-xxv. Emphases mine. [↩]
5. For Derrida, the impossible constitutes an event that is not tantamount to logical contradiction (as in p or not p) but open to phenomenological alterity and the arrival of the unforeseeable.  As John D. Caputo puts it (The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event [Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2006], 109-110), “the event is something for which no horizon of possibility of forseeability is able to prepare us, something that contradicts our mundane expectations, which is what we mean by the impossible. […] The event presupposes both a horizon of possibility and expectation and the possibility of shattering our horizons and expectations, the possibility of the impossible.” See also Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), passim and Caputo and Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), passim.  As far as the eschatology of Empire goes, the impossible is that which ruptures the constructions of possibility regulated by Empire through divine transcendence. [↩]
6. Míguez, Rieger, and Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire, 20-21. [↩]
7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 81. Cf. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 255. Emphasis original. [↩]
8. Contrary to the typical neo-orthodox appropriation, Joerg Rieger reads Karl Barth’s understanding of God as wholly Other as providing the foundation for a liberative theology that turns toward the other who is repressed by society and Empire.  See Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2001), 43-69. [↩]
9. Rieger, No Rising Tide, 70.  See also Mark Lewis Taylor, “Empire and Transcendence: Hardt and Negri’s Challenge to Theology and Ethics, Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo, Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, eds. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2008), 201-218; Míguez, Rieger, and Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire, passim; and Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2007), passim. [↩]
10. Moltmann, A Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1993), 16. [↩]
11. Ibid., 165. Emphases original. [↩]
12. Ibid., 192. [↩]
13. As Moltmann puts it (God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Sprit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1993], 170)  “the essential thing about the incarnation of the Son is that it is an event by which God binds himself [sic] to humanity.” Emphasis mine. [↩]
14. Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2008), 54. [↩]
15. Rieger, No Rising Tide, 130. Emphasis mine.  Similarly, Hardt and Negri, in the sequel to Empire (Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2004], 237) note the contrast between the force of Empire imposed “from above” and the power of democracy in the multitude which is galvanized “from below.” [↩]
16. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2:1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. T.H.L. Parker et al. (New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 386-87.  Emphasis mine. [↩]
17. Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2008), 51. [↩]

The Eschatological Narrative of Empire: The Gospel of Neoliberalism

Though it was published almost a decade before Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man offers perhaps the best description of the eschatological trajectory of Empire.¹ Utilizing Hegel’s dialectic and resurrecting the previously fallen myth of modern progress, Fukuyama claims that with the triumph of liberal-democracy and capitalism over against the Soviet Union history as reached its zenith point and final stage of evolution.  In an article which proved to be the genesis for his book by the same name, Fukuyama states it quite baldly:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.²

Fukuyama goes on in both the article and the book to praise the advent, triumph, and spread of neoliberalism — that is, of Empire — around the globe as a liberating force for freedom and emancipation.  The only catch, of course, is that this “freedom” has a huge unnamed caveat: that one consigns him or herself in service to the ideological apparatus of the state (which, under the passage that Hardt and Negri describe, is itself in service to the larger superstructure) and thereby to the inertia of global Empire.³ For Fukuyama, the victory of neoliberalism negates the previous epoch of violence and totalitarianism and thus completes the dialectic by ushering in a utopian era of peace and global prosperity as society moves toward its best possible formulation.

This is a weighty and far-reaching thesis.  The victory of global capitalism spells the end of history insofar as history signifies the progression of human society and the evolution of production and emancipation. Put bluntly, there is nothing else for one to look forward to regardless of her status and position in society because we have arrived at the final and highest stage of our humanity.  Fukuyama points to an all encompassing, ahistorical ideal imposed from above, from some other plane outside of history, marking the end of history and the arrival of a new “universal and homogenous state”⁴ which will apparently satisfy the desire of its citizens.  As Hardt and Negri put it, “Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its [own] ethical order…as permanent, eternal, and necessary.”⁵ Everything — literally, everything — is subsumed under the transcendence of Empire; its reach and its order have no limits.⁶ Empire, then, operates under what might be called, to the surprise of its neo-liberal apologists, a totalitarian logic.⁷ The twist here is that through the use of ideology and biopower persons are made to believe that they are free, that they have the option to choose within the free-market.  These are the nuts and bolts of capitalism: that consumers can go out into the marketplace and chose between products based on unrestrained competition.  But the chilling reality, the stark truth that the evangelists of Empire always fail to mention, is that persons are only free insofar as they acquiesce to the system.  Options within the system are fabricated, giving one the illusion of freedom while the cold truth is that one has no choice but to participate, to play the game and, as the ominous voice in The Wizard of Oz states, to “never mind the man behind the curtain.”  Empire, in the last instance, is an invisible, all encompassing transcendental reality which perpetuates an ahistorical eschatological narrative with absolutely no basis in the concrete reality of human interactions.

It should be no surprise, then, that Fukuyama uses religious language and eschatological imagery to describe the “end of history” and the reality of the presence of Empire.  In his introduction, Fukuyama equates liberal-democracy — which, for him, is realized on a global scale through the spread of capitalism — with the Exodus narrative, specifically the image of “The Promised Land.”⁸ Indeed, Fukuyama asserts, in a turn of phrase reminiscent of the quintessential evangelical preacher, that the “good news has come”⁹ with the decline totalitarianism in the twentieth-century and the subsequent victory of neoliberal capitalism. Jacques Derrida, in his vitriolic and erudite critique of Fukuyama and other neoliberal evangelists,¹⁰ notes that even when he leaves out the explicit eschatological imagery and quasi-theological language, Fukuyama’s “neo-evangelistic” version of the end of history is reliant upon a “highly Christianized” version of the Hegelian dialectic which is rhetorically structured like a new gospel.¹¹ Like Hardt and Negri, Derrida sees this gospel of global capitalism and rhetoric of the end of history as imbibing an “anhistoric telos” and, in the Kantian sense, an absolute, regulatory “ideal orientation” detached from empirical reality and the normal succession of events.¹² For Derrida, this messianic orientation, as a “telos of progress…would have the form of an ideal finality and everything that appears to contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and global and multiple it might be.”¹³ There is, therefore, a religious structure at work in Fukuyama’s claims and his faith in neoliberalism.

Eschatologically, the end of history marks the suspension of material reality and, not unlike the escapist, other-worldly eschatologies at work in some versions of Christianity, assumes a great degree of trust in neoliberal capitalism as “a regulating and tran-historical ideal”¹⁴ which, regardless of the state of affairs in actuality, serves as an invisible transcendental guarantor, subsuming immanent reality underneath its own reach.  In other words, the logic of Empire — that is the end of history under global capitalism — is idealistic and utilitarian.  It does not care about the reality on the ground nor of its effects on the lives of real people (especially those on the margins) because, given its telos, all is guaranteed in the end as long as one as enough “faith” in the superstructure.  As Joerg Rieger puts it, “the transcendence of the market is affirmed…across the board since nothing is allowed to touch on its fundamentals, which are safely stashed away in other-worldly realms.”¹⁵ This toxic eschatology, coupled with the ideological use of biopower outlined above, fabricates a reality within Empire which runs the very serious risk of colonizing the imagination of the masses such that the thought of any sort of alternative is unimaginable.¹⁶ Perhaps this was nowhere more evident than in the response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009.  The question on the minds of many was not “is there a more sustainable, liberative, and just alternative?” but “what must we do to fix the system and what have we done wrong to make it turn on us?”  The overall mindset was that the superstructure was “too big to fail” and that it would “level out on its own over time” — never mind the effects it has on people — especially those that are must vulnerable — economically in the meantime.  The chilling result of all this, then, is that “at present, most people in the United States appear to find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”¹⁷ It seems that the old Thatcher-Reagan doctrine of the 1980s is at work now more than ever: global capitalist Empire is here to stay in all its homogenizing and totalizing force and there is no viable alternative.

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1. After 9/11 and certainly after the financial crisis of 2008-2009 it is very easy and indeed fashionable to point out that Fukuyama’s thesis has been discredited.  However, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out more than once, while it is easy to do so overtly, under the surface most everyone accepts the ideology of Empire: that global capitalism is here to stay and there is no viable alternative.  See Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 301; In Defense of Lost Causes (New York, New York: Verso, 2008), 421; and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, passim. [↩]
2. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest no. 16 (1989): 3.  Available online at http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm (accessed 2/28/10). Emphasis mine. [↩]
3. As John Gray puts it (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals [New York, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007], 110) “We are forced to live as if we are free.” [↩]
4. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 199ff. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 11. [↩]
6. Ibid., xiv. [↩]
7. Sheldon Wolin calls this a type of inverted totalitarianism.  See his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008).  See also Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: Theology and Politics in a New Key (Norwich: SCM Press, 2009), especially the first chapter, “Empire, Religion, and the Political,” 1-25. [↩]
8. Fukuyama, The End of History, xv. Such a comparison is chilling to say the least, not to mention that it runs counter to the perspective of liberation theology (whilst co-opting its tropes), an important voice which speaks from the underside of capitalism and, at least in part, reveals its true, anti-human logic. [↩]
9. Ibid., xiii. [↩]
10. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, New York: Routledge, 1994), 70-95. [↩]
11. Ibid., 74, 77, 70ff. [↩]
12. Ibid., 71. [↩]
13. Ibid. [↩]
14. Ibid., 78.  Derrida drives this point home even further a few pages prior where he unmasks Fukuyama’s “Christian” use of Hegel and his conflation of God and the market: The model of the liberal State to which [Fukuyama] explicitly lays claim is not only that of Hegel, the Hegel of the struggle of recognition, it is that of a Hegel who privileges the “Christian vision.” If “the existence of the State is the coming of God into the world,” as one reads in The Philosophy of Right invoked by Fukuyama, this coming has the sense of a Christian event. […] The end of history is essentially a Christian eschatology (75-76, Emphasis mine). [↩]
15. Rieger,  No Rising Tide, 72. [↩]
16. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 27-28; 77-78. [↩]
17. Rieger, No Rising Tide, 72. Or, as Fredric Jameson puts in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 50, “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” [↩]

Power and Postmodern Empire: Sovereignty and Invisibility

In their seminal and erudite work Empire, Hardt and Negri provide an exhaustive political and philosophical genealogy of the historical evolution of imperialism from the dawn of modernity to the current era of globalization.  Along with this new epoch comes a new(er) form of sovereignty. The collapse of colonial regimes in the twentieth century and the demise of the Soviet Union signify the triumph of the global capitalist market and with it a new network of power — a superstructure one might say — that transcends the modern nation-state.  This new conglomeration consists of various transnational corporations and organisms which together constitute Empire and function as the driving apparatus of the world market, the new neoliberal order of global capitalism.  With the rise of this superstructure, the sovereignty of the modern nation-state has declined but, as Hardt and Negri are quick to point out, this does not mean that sovereignty as such is in decline.¹ Rather, what is emerging is a new form of global, transcendental sovereignty based upon these supra-structures and entities.  Hardt and Negri name this new postmodern form of sovereignty Empire.² Whereas under the modern form of sovereignty nation-states could “go it alone,” so to speak, in their own imperial and hegemonic exploits, Empire, because of its supra-national structure, precludes a singular nation from doing so.  In other words, nations are no longer shielded and insulated from the global network; rather, their politics are determined, and their policies made subservient to, the economics of Empire.  As Kwok Pui-lan succinctly puts it, “the market is not now subjected to the control of individual nation-states, but is rather dictated by transnational economic powers defined by greed and corporate interests.”³ This is evident by the inability of singular states to regulate economic and cultural exchanges on a global scale as they once could under standard imperial and colonial structures.⁴ Thus, the various imperialisms of modernity have lost their grip and no longer hold.  What we are experiencing in the era of globalization is a passage from imperialism to Empire.⁵

Not only are the in/formal structures of Empire less visible than they were under modern imperialisms, the very notion of power — its usage, control, and employment — are invisible as well.⁶ Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower developed in his The History of Sexuality, Hardt and Negri argue that under the problematic of Empire power is less overt than before and its usage and demarcation express a certain degree of ambivalence.⁷ Whereas in modernity power and authority came “from above” to issue control, under Empire the mechanisms of command are much more immanent in society “distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens” such that the “behaviors of social integration and exclusion [are]…increasingly interiorized within the [political] subjects themselves.”⁸ With the passage to Empire, biopower becomes intrinsic to the good life, “regulat[ing] social life from its interior” and “achiev[ing] an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord.”⁹ Thus, while the biopower of Empire is more invisible than the brute force of the modern nation-state’s imperialisms, it is surely no less toxic or lethal.  In fact, biopower in Empire may be more toxic and more lethal precisely because of its invisibility.  Moreover, this power is buttressed and reinforced by the ideological apparatus of the state. We see this at work most effectively in mainstream media.  For instance, recently a Super Bowl advertisement sponsored by the conservative Christian think tank Focus on the Family featuring Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother advocating a pro-life position sparked much controversy and many well-meaning liberals petitioned to have the commercial censored or removed before it aired.¹⁰ The irony here is that while these protestors were criticizing an overt form of advocacy — the kind most associated with modern imperialism — they were oblivious to the more covert forms of advocacy that, in their protest, they were tacitly supporting.  Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for advertising.  Are not all the commercials in some sense advocating for capitalist Empire?  From the Dodge Charger and Old Spice vignettes inferring a false and perverted since of masculinity, to the credit card promotions and the beer advertisements — most all of these advertisements lend at least minimal support to the status quo and promotion of the American Dream (read “the good life”).  As a recent column puts it, “to fail to recognize the intention and consequences of commercials pushing trucks and SUV’s is naïve.”¹¹ It is not so much naïve as it is normal.  This is precisely the function of biopower as Hardt and Negri see it: the tentacles of the superstructure have penetrated the fabric of the social and political subject to such an extent that to be happy and to pursue the good life means to freely offer oneself — one’s mind and body — in support to Empire without even realizing it, indeed to do so under the guise of entertainment and pursuit of the so-called good life (e.g., having a beer with friends and watching the Super Bowl).  Biopower, therefore, constitutes those manifestations of power which, under capitalist Empire, oversee “the production and reproduction of life itself,” expressing themselves as a form of covert ideological control that “extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations.”¹² At this point one does not need to point out that the problematic of Empire presents all sorts of pressing theological issues, however, as we shall see below, the eschatological question is perhaps chief among them.

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1. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi. [↩]
2. Ibid., xii. [↩]
3. Kwok Pui-lan, “Liberation Theology in the Twenty-First Century,” Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, ed. Joerg Rieger (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73. [↩]
4. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii. [↩]
5. There are many monikers one might use to describe this new world order — global transnational capitalism, neoliberal globalization, for instance — however I follow Hardt and Negri and choose to refer to it as simply Empire. [↩]
6. Cf. Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 2007), 5, 275. [↩]
7. For our purposes, it is worth noting that the notion of ambivalence within postmodern power structures is an important theme within postcolonial theory and subaltern studies.  Cf. Homi K. Bhabha’s foundational text, The Location of Culture (New York, New York: Routledge Press, 1994.  For a theological perspective, see Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (Danvers, Massachusetts: Chalice Press, 2004). One should also take note of Hardt and Negri’s own critique of postmodern and postcolonial thought in Empire, 137-143.  Their evaluation parallels that of Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and other post-Marxists theorists who claim that postmodernity is, in the final analysis, simply the cultural logic of a “late capitalist” society. [↩]
8. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. [↩]
9. Ibid., 23-24. [↩]
10. This commercial can be viewed online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BIOTItUwvk (accessed 2/28/10).  It turns out that this form of advocacy was much less inflammatory than many expected.  I would argue that is far less explicit and perhaps even docile in comparison to those that buttress and reinforce the logic of capitalism. [↩]
11. Bill Littlefield, “Advocacy is in the Eye of the Beholder,” WBUR News, Feb. 4, 2010 http://www.wbur.org/2010/02/04/tebow-et-al/ (accessed 2/14/10). [↩]
12. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24. [↩]

The Eschatological Problem

In our current context, eschatology is arguably the most important theological loci, demanding sustained critical reflection. It is certainly the most visible doctrine in the so-called secular world, forming and constituting our collective consciousness. Indeed, one could argue that the twentieth century with all its tragedies and atrocities — war, natural disasters, genocide, nuclear proliferation and the like — was one in which the eschatological narrative of modern of progress was thoroughly demystified. Yet with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s another eschatological narrative gained currency, that of global neoliberal capitalism best defended by Francis Fukuyama who claimed that the advent of liberal-democracy marked the highest form of human government and the definitive “end of history.”¹ The new emerging network of transnational corporatism, which undergirds the global market, constitutes what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call a new postmodern Empire.² With the financial crisis of 2008-2009 this narrative too was called into question and if the actions of both the Bush and Obama Administrations are any indication it would seem that depression and near collapse were not enough to adequately unmask the chilling logic of unbridled casino capitalism nor to delegitimize the eschatological narrative brokered by the purveyors of neoliberal globalization.³ It would seem, then, that a sound Christian eschatology has never been more important or needed than it is now.  Unfortunately, the usual alternatives are equally as grim, whether it is an escapist, other-worldly eschatology which implies that one should simply deal with her problems since this life is only a grand waiting room for the afterlife, on the one hand, or a bland realized eschatology which is reliant on the myth of modern progress and therefore remains complicit in the destructive status quo of Empire, on the other.   In other words, Christian eschatology, in both its conservative and liberal forms, all too often falls prey to the inertia of the prevailing metanarrative (in this case, global capitalism) rather than remaining fixed upon the rupture of the event, of the incoming of the reign of God within history.  Insofar as this is true Marx was correct in his famous assessment of popular religion as nothing more than an “opium of the people” and the “sigh of the oppressed.”⁴

It is my contention in this paper that a distinctively Christian eschatology, when liberated from the narratives of Empire and neoliberalism, is itself liberative.  I will begin by sketching the contours of the new postmodern Empire delineated by Hardt and Negri followed by an analysis and critique of the eschatological narrative, however overt or covert, imbibed by Empire and best seen in the work of Francis Fukuyama.  Relying on theologians and continental philosophers of religion such as Joerg Rieger, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Moltmann I will then offer an alternative narrative, an incarnational eschatology modeled after the gesture of the incarnation and the logic of downturn.  Ultimately, I hope to offer an eschatological vision that is both realistic and hopeful; realistic about the great weight and force of the totalizing narrative of Empire but hopeful that when unhooked from the telos of Empire an incarnational eschatology can be both wholly invested in the world and open to the in-breaking of God’s absolute future.  I am, therefore, arguing for an eschatology that is the very heart and soul — indeed, the very medium — of the work of theology, an eschatology that is not consigned to an ahistorical future, pontificating about “last things,” but an eschatology that is rooted in the material present, positioning itself as “the doctrine and wisdom of hope.”⁵

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, New York: Avon Books, 1993).  Even after Sept. 11, 2001, this narrative is not without its apologists.  In addition to virtually every elected official in the US government, noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, New York: Picador, 2005) puts forward an argument in favor of globalization noting the technological benefits.  Interestingly, those benefits are only available for those in positions of privilege vis-à-vis the new Empire and not those upon whose backs the Empire is built. [↩]
2. See their recently completed trilogy: Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, New York: Penguin Press, 2004), and Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009). [↩]
3. Records of the rush to “save the system” and bailout the banks and corporations which hold the networks of power within Empire together are well documented.  For a scathing analysis of this response and its consequences if left untouched see Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2009).  In No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 2009), Joerg Rieger explores this phenomenon from a theological perspective paying particular attention to the religious structure in the US governments response, i.e., the “faith” placed in the transcendence of the market despite its failure. [↩]
4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1993), 42. [↩]
5. Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2000), 51. This has been Moltmann’s contention ever since the publication of his Theology of Hope in 1965.  More recently he has stated more strongly and emphatically that “eschatology is not just one of Christianity’s many doctrines…it is quite simply the medium of the Christian faith, the keynote, the daybreak of colours of a new expected day which bathe everything in their light.  For the Christian faith lives from the raising of the crucified Christ and reaches out towards the promises of Christ’s universal future,” Experiences of God (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2007), 11-12.  To be sure, an incarnational eschatology fundamentally rooted in the historical present does not dismiss the advent of God’s future; rather, it rejects, contra the eschatological narrative of modernity and Empire, any inclination that that future is fixed and determined. [↩]

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.

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.  As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not he wants to accept the ramifications.  A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through i, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it. Curious is the key word.  [It has] nothing to do with organized religion.  It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. [...] What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook regardless what your religion is.”                                                                                                                                       — Seth Godin in Tribes, pg. 63-64

Really, really interesting.  Thoughts?