(Ir)religiosity

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

I posted a comment yesterday on Callid Keefe-Perry’s latest vlog over at The Image of Fish that I think bears further reflection.  It relates to some of my latest thinking on some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation for my thesis next year.  It’s a nascent idea and not at all developed, but I thought I would float it and see what sort of feedback it might get.

Callid is commenting in large part on some of the responses to Jason Derr’s excellent piece over at HuffPo Religion on the role of poetry in the religious imagination.  The aim of Derr’s article is to argue that theology ought not be couched primarily as a scientific enterprise (in the modern sense) mainly interested in cold hard facts and what can clearly be empirically observed in the world.  Instead, theology after modernity might look more like a mythopoetic enterprise, a discourse more akin to work of the poet in her exploration of the contours of human experience — our passions and desires — than the misguided quest for objectivity of epistemological certainty.  As Derr writes, “Poetry and metaphor are important as ways of doing theology. In a world so divided by absolute claims, using metaphor and poetry allows us to have room for flex.”  He even picks up on a metaphor I used in my last post in describing theology as a type of seeing-as which is not so much concerned about complete descriptions of reality as it is communicating reality through imagery and symbol, of exploring what is going on in reality phenomenologically.  For Derr (and others) this is the work of theopoetics.

Like I mentioned, Callid’s post is primarily a thoughtful response to some of the more negative, one might even say uncharitable, feedback Derr’s piece has received.  This seems to be part of a larger trend I’ve notice on some more popular sites like HuffPo that now have an active religion section.  I don’t have the time or the desire to wade through all the comments that posts like this illicit (frankly, most of them aren’t worth it), but I do try to gauge the overall response from time to time.  And usually the response tends to sway in favor of a sort of antagonistic, positivistic outlook toward religion, the likes of which the so-called “new” atheists are now infamous for advancing.

One of the points Callid takes up in the video is the age-old modern criticism that, in the final instance, religion isn’t really about reality it all, that ultimately the existence of a deity cannot be proved, that when you get right down to it “there is nothing there there.” One commenter on Derr’s piece cites a Thomas Paine quote which I think serves as a good, succint summation of this sort of criticism.  See the quote after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the unfortunate side effects of so-called “new” atheism (besides general intransigent arrogance and a lack of intellectual honesty) has been further (false) dichotomization of science and religion and rigid entrenchment into the reductionistic foxholes of scientism and religious fundamentalism.  Positivistic intellectuals like ‘Ditchkins’ and your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety Christianists like, say, Ken Ham or Carl Wieland are ready to hedge their bets on the misguided and myopic supposition that the discourses of science and religion fundamentally and foundationally incompatible.  The irony in all this is that both camps are both partially correct yet completely wrong in asserting complete epistemological superiority.  The similarities of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists has been well documented.  I don’t want to rehash that position except to take note of the core assertion:  that when it comes to matters of exclusivity, intolerance, and arrogance new atheism and religious fundamentalism more similar than they are different, functioning as mirror images of the core logic, shadow-boxers or ships passing in the night, one might say.  Which is why the vitriolic arguments are, at times, just as entertaining as they are tiresome.

This brings me to Jon Stewart’s great interview with Marilynne Robinson last night on The Daily Show promoting her new book Absence of Mind. See the video below after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

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?

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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• Incarnational eschatology [2] (blakehuggins.com)
• Incarnational eschatology [3] (blakehuggins.com)

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.” [↩]

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.

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.

If God in Christ dies for real on the cross then what is the meaning of the resurrection?

My contention would be that Good Friday is not superseded by Easter Sunday, that the resurrection does not supplant the crucifixion.

The problem, I think, is that we are too quick to separate Pentecost from the Resurrection.  Pentecost marks the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the faith collective, the arrival of a new signifier which, after Christ’s death on the cross, is immanent to the collective itself.

The collective, then, is one that is deprived of its support from the Big other, as Zizek would put it.  Christ is raised in the community of believers through the liberative power of the Holy Spirit.  The entrance of the Spirit as the life of the collective spells the end of God as transcendental signified and the beginning of God as emancipatory event.

The resurrection of Christ does not involve a mere return or reduplication of his prior presence.  Rather, it involves the repetition of that presence with critical difference (i.e., the Spirit).  The logic of resurrection is in fact the logic of repetition.  The absence of God qua Big other, of God qua transcendental signified is overcome (that is, repeated, resurrected) with the presence of the Spirit, with the entrance of a new liberative signifier immanent and intrinsic to the community.

Under this sign, with the power of the Spirit, and the galvanizing memory of God’s crucified body, the community of believers perpetually enacts a non-identical repetition of Christ’s gesture under the conviction that Empire can never repress such a memory absolutely.  Indeed, there will always remain a liberative surplus, an emancipatory kernel, which opens up the space for crucial theo-political praxis and social antagonism.  It is here, in this tear in the ontological fabric of Empire, where God’s event pierces and violates its supposed immanence, that Christ is indeed resurrected.  And it is incumbent on the community, on its participation and repetition.

Shortly before he was martyred, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote, “If I am killed I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Similarly, in an important scene of V for Vendetta, V states that “ideas are bulletproof.”  When Easter is celebrated in anticipation of Pentecost one can properly claim that the most important and liberative idea of all is in fact crucifixion-proof.  While God as transcendental signified may have died on the cross, the idea of God’s kin-dom surely did not.  The instruments of torture and state-sponsored terrorism cannot hold it because Empire can never maintain absolute hegemonic control.  Even as God is dead, even as God is eclipsed, Christ is risen, made present in the community through the power of the Spirit.  And it is through this dangerous, galvanizing memory that the church enacts critical repetition, in (e)sc(h)atological anticipation of the consummation of the (in/re)surrection.