(Ir)religiosity

My last post generated quite a bit of feedback, both publicly and privately. It seems that I struck a nerve here and most of the folks I am hearing from resonated with much of what I said. I do, however, want to add a few clarifications.

Despite my tone — which is a little harsh in places and rightfully so I think — I am not suggesting that what some are calling “positive belief” simple be abandoned or dismissed. I am, after all, dealing with the Christian tradition in which I have been inculcated. I am a theologian and I use the symbolic framework and the social imaginary of this tradition. Better, I interpret these things as best I can and try to read and reread them in creative ways, hopefully in ways that have been for whatever reason silenced or glossed over by the dominant power discourse. All of this involves positive belief, argumentation, and responsibility for my thought ideas. On this point Derrida agrees with me. Though he is situated in a different tradition, I believe his body of work stands as a testament to detractors who would suggest otherwise.

For me, the problem is not with “positive belief” per se, but rather how said belief is used and wielded. The language and tone I hear around “reconstruction” suggests to me that belief may be given a new label but it is still built around a metaphysics of presence and given substantial recourse to some sort of big Other, what Derrida calls a transcendental signified, that ultimately secures things. For me this is untenable and representative of the attitude that deconstruction is merely a stage rather than an ongoing discursive strategy. As I said before it should alway infect theology, leaving the tension between religious desire and the belief structures that necessarily facilitate that desire forever open and haunted by that which that can never fully contain. If anything it is an argument for the proliferation of “positive belief” and a multiplicity of understandings within a tradition on the condition that these things are provisional, susceptible to reinterpretation, and open to fall under the judgment and analysis of rigorous scrutiny.

I am as much a critic as I am a theologian — the two are always closely intertwined for me — so when it comes to belief I tend to err on the side of deconstruction, hoping to bear witness to an event that even the most beautiful and persuasive positive belief structure can never fully contain (this is also why I have a deep love for the mystics and the apophatic tradition). I am alway unsaying what I have previously said so I can hopefully, maybe, say it a little better. That doesn’t mean I’m not interesting in saying anything. It just means I want to precise and open to being shown my blindspots, which is maybe another possible definition of deconstruction. I aim to be about the business of reframing and reinterpreting while at the same time taking responsibility for the Christian tradition by inhabiting its language, turning around in it, and showing that there is always some excess that never quite fits into the puzzle perfectly.

A theology infected by deconstruction is always looking over its shoulder, always oscillating between the known and the unknown, leaving the tension, the wound of divine desire, open and festering in order to say something, however feeble or inadequate, about the event by which it is animated. So in a sense, there is no reconstruction that needs to be done. It is all already there, the tradition is before us and ahead of us. We already have the constructions. Good theology is about negotiating how they function in discourse and life, asking whether they foster a posture of unmitigated hospitality toward heterogeneity and alterity, toward the divine itself, or whether they squelch it through misguided quests for ultimate grounds, bedrock foundations, and sedimented structures.

And that’s why I am not interested in leaving deconstruction behind for mere surface reconstruction — because for me deconstruction is, as friend of mine put it, a sustained spiritual practice, fostering a deep sense of awe and wonder at the world and incessantly reminding me that the divine always lies ahead of even my best theological ideas.

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Recently I tweeted a truncated version of one of my biggest frustrations about the use of the word “deconstruction” in the emergent church. I got some responses suggesting that I clarify and elaborate. So here we go.

First, blame shouldn’t fall solely on emergent church folk. Philosophers and cultural theorists (who should know better!) have  also misused the word since it gained popularity in discourse. The fact that Jacques Derrida‘s (in)famous hermeneutic (if i can call it that) translates to a very common word in the English language doesn’t help much either. The word is already operative in our common vocabulary and it carries with it certain connotations that run completely counter to its theoretical function. So the inertia is against us before we get to the emergent church. I think Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in Nutshell should be mandatory reading for anyone who uses or hopes to use the word deconstruction as a key concept (in the emergent church or otherwise).

Popular use notwithstanding, I do think that emergent church folk are particularly and especially culpable for their use and misuse of the word theoretically and theologically in large part because of their affinity toward postmodern philosophy and their use of key thinkers like Derrida. This makes things complicated and, if dissected closely, I think it shows that the emergent church — or at least some subgroup(s) within it — aren’t all that different from mainstream Christianity and certainly not as subversive as some had initially hoped.

My frustration stems from the tweets, Facebook statuses, and blog posts (and books) that I see from time to time where someone will in effect suggest that having a “deconstructive stage” was important for a while but now its time to “get serious” and start reconstructing things (faith, theology, etc.) toward some sort of “new” end. In essence, deconstruction is given a negative and overly critical connotation and is understood to be the initial step in a larger process. Doubt was good and cool for a time, criticizing and rejecting conventional religiosity was fun while it lasted, but the real work starts when you decided to start affirming and arguing core theological tenets anchored by a foundation. When I read and hear things like this I realize how unfortunate it is that the mystics and the via negativa don’t get more play in emergent church circles. Read the rest of this entry »

St. John’s Nottingham has a fantastic theological timeline available online. It is very detailed and includes in depth videos by some top-notch scholars on various figures and schools of thought. Something like this is a great resource for anyone interested in the history and development of theology. Unfortunately you have to jump through some hoops to see the whole thing (and for some reason it is no longer completely free) but you can view all the videos on the St. John’s youtube channel.

One of the more recent additions includes a video overview of Derrida and his impact on theology. The presenter is Steven Shakespeare of Liverpool Hope University. Shakespeare has written one the best introductory texts on Derrida and theology I’ve read in Continuum’s Philosophy and Theology series. The video is a bit long but it provides an excellent sketch of Derrida’s intellectual biography and context, drawing particular attention to some main themes and concepts that have significant theological import. Not exactly an easy task! Check out the video below.

As I am in the process of research and writing my thesis over post-ontotheological eschatology I find myself returning to some of Derrida‘s earlier writings. Doing so further confirms my growing suspicion that Derrida’s entire oeuvre, since his earliest work on Husserl and différance, is primarily concerned with a type of event-tive temporality, what I am unabashedly calling a vermiculate, non-teleological eschatology. For instance, this morning I ran across this passage early in Of Grammatology that I’ve always missed before.

Perhaps patient mediation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it by some obsurcantist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For the future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that guides our future anterior, there is as yet not exergue (4-5).

So I think I am to the point where I am ready to argue that, whatever else it may be, deconstruction is a certain type of eschatology, i.e., it harbors a certain eschatology or maintains a crypto-eschatological tone even though Derrida himself was reticent to use that language. It is certainly there and it is interesting to me that theologians have yet to tease it out in a sustained manner. Even John Caputo’s theology of the event, which comes close to doing what I am imagining, fails to acknowledge itself as a type of eschatology. My inclination is that people like Caputo just aren’t interested in dealing with all the baggage of conventional theology and classical theism that comes with working on eschatology. Yet, one of the stated aims of The Weakness of God is to reveal the deconstruction at work in those traditional themes. It seems to me that the critique of ontotheology enables one to (re)think eschatology otherwise just as much as it allows the rehabilitation of theology in general.

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.” [↩]

I’m beginning preliminary research for an upcoming project exploring a poststructuralist pneumatology. Surprisingly, I have not found much out there dealing with the two. I’m hoping that someone might know of few articles or books dealing with that nexus.

I’d be especially keen on works that deal with the Spirit and Derrida’s notion of différance. Thanks in advance.

Philosophy, as logocentrism, is present in every scientific discipline and the only justification for transforming philosophy into a specialized discipline is the necessity to render explicit and thematic the philosophical subtext in every discourse. The principal function which the teaching of philosophy serves is to enable people to become ‘conscious’, to become aware of what exactly they are saying, what kind of discourse they are engaged in when they do mathematics, physics, political economy, and so on.  There is no system of teaching or transmitting knowledge which can retain its coherence or integrity without, at one moment or another, interrogating itself philosophically that is, without acknowledging its subtextual premises; and this may even include an interrogation of unspoken political interests or traditional values. From such an interrogation each society draws its own conclusions about the worth of philosophy.

–Jacques Derrida, States of Mind, 165.

Substitute (or supplement) “philosophy” and “society” with “theology” and “church” and this is precisely why I believe that academic theology is so important.  Because without it all of the tacit, implicit, and sub-level practical theologies — whether they be good, bad, healthy or destructive — remain unnamed, unchallenged, and are never critically examined.  The church must take seriously the work of academic theological discourse.  Likewise, the academics must — must! — see to it that they are in serious and intentional dialogue with the communities and collectives that take them seriously.  We need more church folk reading serious theology and more theologians talking to people in the pew.  Better yet, we need more of those rare persons who occupy the liminal and transient space between the church and the academy.

This is precisely the aim of Philip Clayton (and Tripp Fuller’s) new book, Transforming Christian Theology. Consider this post a prolegomena to my engagement with that book.  I have had it for a while and been busy with other things and I have only just begun to really get into it but I will say this:  it is refreshing and deeply encouraging to see a prominent academic theologian taking this seriously.

It would be easy for me to rattle off a list of people who have influenced my hermeneutics from the worlds of theology and religious studies.  So I thought I would make it a bit more interesting and list several thinkers from outside the religious world (more or less) who influence my interpretation of not only the bible but literature in general.  Of course any “list” is always incomplete and unfinished.  There are many people who have indirectly influence my interpretive approach; I’m limiting this list to those that are more direct and most recent in time.  So here is my “hand” of 7 (in no particular order).

• Jacques Derrida - for deconstruction and différance
• Paul Ricoeur - for symbolism/myth and a hermeneutics of suspicion
• Judith Butler - for gender/sexuality identity and social construction
• Stanley Fish - for the importance of  interpretive communities and the downfall of foundationalism
• Emmanuel Levinas – for “ethics as philosophy” and the presence of the Other
• Michel Foucault – for the importance of history and power relations
• Cornel West - for “prophetic pragmatism” and the Socratic imperative

That’s my blend at the moment.

Who are a few of your non-religious and non-theological influences?

I’ll put all my cards on the table:  I think Kierkegaard is unfortunately habitually misread today.  The common reading as dictated by the philosophical and theological canon and undoubtedly displayed in undergraduate intro. courses couches (and caricatures) Kierkegaard as a prime example of religious fidelity gone awry.  His “teleological suspension of the ethical” represents all that is wrong and dangerous with religion after the Enlightenment and such a position is decidedly irrational, lacking the proper grounding in ethical reasoning.  That is one reading.  To be sure, it is important and one that should be not ignored, but it is, however, not the only one nor is it, in my view, the best one.

I was re-reading some articles and interviews by John Caputo in preparation for Emergent Outliers’ first book club meeting tonight (you should join us!) when I ran across an interesting reading of Kierkegaard that avoids that usual, banal approach and obliquely offers a critique of modern ethics.  Commenting on Derrida‘s reading of Fear and Trembling, Caputo writes that:¹

“Responsibility is the issue of the singularity of the situation of the responing subject (for which “Abraham” is a place-holder) standing alone before the “wholly other” (for which “God” is a place-holder) while the demands of the “other others” (for which Isaac is a place-holder) press in upon and interrupt the intimacy of this exclusive tête-à-tête ["head-to-head"].  Thus, to decide responsibly is always a matter of sacrificing “Isaac,” the ones who hold the Isaac position, by which he [Derrida] means, of sensitizing oneself to my responsibility to all the other others who also lay claim to my responsibility, even as I respond to the other one before me.  Unlike de Silentio, Derrida’s analysis does not turn a suspension of my ethical duty in the face of the religious call that overrides it, but on the conflict of ethical duties that structures every ethical choice, which makes the paradox of the akedah [the binding of Isaac] the paradigm of everyday ethical decisions right on down to the smallest detail….”

Interesting.  So instead of fixating on Abraham’s suspension of ethics perhaps it is helpful to read the narrative in a different manner, one that recognizes the sacrifice and conflict that is inherent in every ethical decision.  One must always, in every situation (even the most mundane and seemingly insignificant), chose between opposing responsibilities as there always other others.  That is the paradox of ethics and a paradox that most popular approaches to ethics (the deontological, utilitarianism, etc.) seem to avoid precisely because they are impermeable systems conceived in the abstract, demanding fidelity to a certain set of presupposed to premises which may or may not relate to the situation at hand.  I suspect that this is what Caputo is getting at in his book Against Ethics (though I have not read it in it entirety) and I believe that this is what the usual readings of Kierkegaard miss:  that modern ethical systems, while helpful as guidelines, will always be deconstructible insofar as they posit a set of disembodied propositions that must be applied to situation that always already has other cards that have been played ahead of time.

Such a critique virtually renders moot the tiring discussions we’ve all had over which ethical system is the best because all systems are in agreement that the most proper approach should be conceived in the abstract, relying on the so-called impartiality of Reason and  constructed outside palpable relations with the wholly Other and other others.  But the  true ethical dilemma is the one that catches us by surprise as we realize the impossible choice we must make between two responsibilities, two others who have already laid claim to us.  Such an event, not at all unlike the one faced by Abraham, simply cannot be solved by a intangible system alone.

That is, I believe, an unsung lesson of Kierkegaard and one that Caputo and Derrida can both return to after the desert of modern criticism:  that there is always already conflict inherent in every ethical situation, conflict that cannot be fully resolved and conflict that demands a choice between rival responsibilities and irreconcilable others.

1. The quotation is taken from an article Caputo wrote in the 2002 Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook titled, “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion, pg. 8-9.  Caputo writes on the same subject at length in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion without Religion, but the article provides the most concise and lucid description of his larger, more complex argument. [↩]