(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 »

Conclusion: Critical Repetition

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my writings page.  Mainly because I haven’t really written anything worthwhile or anything I thought someone would find interesting (not that I ever did anyway).  I put up two new files.  A short paper on Augustine and Postmodernism and a review of Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy.  Check ‘em out…if you’re into that.