JCRT Live

"Post-America" - an exchange

By David Hale

“When all truth is lost, we at least have irony.” I have always loved Kierkegaard for that remark. In close competition for my affections is Nietzsche’s “hope is the last cry of the slave class.” Is his not the season of the ironical slave? - A time of smug satisfaction that those who are more equal are now in charge of all the rest of the equals? - A time of hope that all things will turn out for the better because of some invisible guiding hand of goodness?

I fear I am hopelessly caught between Kierkegaard’s cynicism and Nietzsche’s utter lack of determinism. Without truth and without hope can there be any life at all? It is in this lifeless indeterminism, somewhere between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, that I wish to respond to Carl Raschke’s rather dark blogs.

Raschke has suggested (darkly) that this greatest nation in all of world history, may be past its nadir. Disregarding this nation’s founding by the hand of God, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and our brave troops fighting oversees… Or, failing that, disregarding this wonderful community of equality, liberality and change… Raschke has described this event horizon. In a decade, he says, we may witness the decline of our beloved America. In his estimation this is an era perhaps comparable to the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine whereas Rome had already been sacked once was headed towards rule by the papacy rather than Caesar. While Washington DC has not been sacked, the World Trade Towers have been destroyed.

Are predictions of America’s demise too soon? But it will happen sooner or later, should we not agree? Should there not be revelry for those who wandered so long in the wilderness as outcastes under the last administration? Why bother to conceive of a post-America? Isn’t this a time for rejoicing? Why try to think the unthinkable or imagine the unimaginable? And won’t we be worse off? - Huddled around open fires, at the mercy of the mob, the elements, and each other, like a pack of animals. This America is the land of law and education - can we imagine life better without either? And don’t we deserve better than the deprivation of the nomad, the Indian, and the aborigine? After all, slaves have been emancipated as have women. Aren’t we better because we know better?  Aren’t we more than equal because we know about equality? Don’t we deserve the better and not the worse? Maybe God did not found this country, but at least He ought to have.

Melville as given us a tale almost as entertaining as Augustine’s fanciful justifications for Christian war and Christian rule. Melville’s tale is of a Great White (rhymes with Male). Ahab’s obsession was with that great blank wall punctuated only be two black holes into which we see into all of our own worst horrors. As the Great White heads towards the ship on its fateful charge, we write our own fears on its featureless forehead. The greatest fear might be the vast blue ocean that swallows all in its limitless immanence. There is kind of fate at work here, but it is not of any design, other than that of the hunter and the hunted, Oedipal father and son, master and the slave. A death we know nothing about, takes one and all.

David Hale is a lecturer in philosophy at Mesa State College in Colorado. He can be reached at chateauway@aol.com. 

Carl Raschke responds:

Although I do not necessarily read myself necessarily as some kind of coded prophet of darkness and doom, as David Hale (himself the dark prophet of the Rockies' Western Slope) seems to suggest, I will acknowledge the characterization, if only to foster a certain measure of cerebral shock and awe.  Hopefully the philosophically minded, such as ourselves, do not have simply to talk politics, as many of our colleagues when they get the occasional opportunity to behave like school children.  We can talk perhaps about the political in the way that philosophers like Derrida started doing about two decades ago - about what remains "undecidable," "spectral," "to come."

The Derridean avenir is hopeful, though it is not about "hope."  That is evident in Derrida's re-engagement with own Judaism from the late 1990s onwards and in his toying with the "messianic."  I suppose, however, Derrida is not ultimately up to snuff when it comes trafficking with real messianism. I call attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal that for what seems the first time in a major American news outlet seriously looks at the international politics of Iran, and the Iranian revolution, as a systematic and self-conscious effort to follow the script of messianic prophecy about the world savior known as the Mahdi in Shiite Islam.  If you want, call Derridean messianism - "messianism without a messiah", the messianism of participatory democracy - messianism lite.  Or, borrowing from the old saying from the 1980s went, we can say "real messianists don't deconstruct."  In other words, they have a real messiah.   

Is a real messiah "post-partisan?" If so, we probably no longer have the messiah some thought we would, because we're for now, as the news shows, we're decidedly post-post-partisan.  But are we on the threshhold of a "post-America?"  If you're a Republican, you probably think that we're getting close, although there is always the 2010 mid-term elections.  1994 anyone?  If you're a Democrat, you're probably rejoicing that we're now "post-George Bush's America."  But the real America is only starting to rise, like some phoenix-like Big Bird of Real Hope and Change, out of the ashes and rubble.  1992 anyone?  The fact is that America keeps rising up every two presidential election cycles or so from the ashes of its ravaged partisan otherness.  If I were a Republican I would remember 1996.  If I were a Democrat, I would remember 2004.

Melville's great cosmo-historical allegory etched within the timeless classic Moby Dick is often read as a not-so-veiled critique of American political messianism, of the "redeemer nation."   But it can also be read as a kind of tragic vision of a kind of messianism now that becomes its own "apocalypse now."  From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan perhaps to the Great Stimulation we are always testing the limits of our own messianism.  When do we cross the invisible line beyond which we see the roadsign "Welcome to Post-America."  Perhaps we've already crossed the line, if we consider the forces of globalization - in both their centrifugal and centripedal fury.  Supposedly the taxpayers will "own" all the companies and big banks we continue to bail out, but in reality it's the Chinese. It used to be said "I don't own my house, the bank does."  Well, since the invention of financial derivatives, they don't own it either.  Nor do the people who bought the derivatives, who really own worthless paper.  It's the guys who own the debt to pay for cleaning up the mess that happened in the first place.

Does anyone "own" America anymore?  John Locke said that "in the beginning all was America."  That's probably true of America as well. The "great American empire," as the rest of the world often says. Sort of like the Holy Roman Empire that Voltaire quipped was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire?

In our messianism do we have the "audacity" or the" arrogance" of hope.

Call me Ishmael.

Labels without scars - mystifying amnesia in today's Presidential politics

By Wendy Felese

As I was watching television last evening with one of my children, a commercial came on that piqued my interest. Combining an urban rap beat with creative animated graphics, the script was suggestive of new beginnings, with an air of excitement and possibility.  The voice of the rapper was male - energetic and signifying youth, hope, change, and a brighter future. “The earth is sustainable…equality is attainable.” As the message reached its end, three words played out on the screen. Are you in?"

Yes, I thought. Yes, I get it…I’m in! The commercial turned out to be for Starbucks.  Clearly, if you “get it” you drink their coffee. I don’t. If there is one caveat of postmodernism (and I recognize the irony), it might be something like - there is no neutral view from no-where. Citing this fact, feminist Lila Abu-Lughod, in conversation with colleague and fellow anthropologist Kirin Narayan, coined the term halfie to describe her unique social position as a scholar. As an anthropologist, her own identity pivots on her multi-ethnic background (Palestinian/American) and her gender. These are fecund vantage points upon which to offer her subjective analyses. She describes advantages and disadvantages associated with these multiple identities, but as an ethnographer, it is imperative that she socially locate herself. In other words, how she sees is as pertinent as what she describes. That allows Abu-Lughod a unique flexibility in her approach – a way of thwarting static categorizations and entrenched methodologies, and yet it renders her vulnerable to a bewildering array of critiques from multiple audiences.

President Obama communicates from a similar social location. As the first weeks of the new administration unfold, we may see far less of this embodiment of paradox. But in the months leading up to the election, this artful self-articulation was astounding to behold.  Take for example, the three small but hermeneutically saturated words, carefully enunciated as a way of linking ideas together to form a global trope. Yes, we can.  Obama’s unique ethnicity (Andrew Young calls him Afro-Asian-Latin European), as it became fused with this phrase, formed an ontological metonomy that captivated imaginations among discrete communities on many different levels. How this materialized is worth examining. Abu-Lughod continues to remain devoted to relentless reflexivity as part of her methodology. At the time she first emerged on the academic scene, she was among a cadre of social scientists rejecting the idea of absolute objectivity, allowing for the intrusion of self as a vital element of her observations.

Can the subaltern speak? Abu-Lughod might offer a conditional yes to this paradigmatic question, but of course, it always depends on to whom and how the speaking manifests itself.  Her use of the term "halfie" was offered as a way of describing individuals whose natural and cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parenthood.  Today, the metaphor is not only discordant, but in the global arena, it is practically obsolete. Its utility as a tactic, however, continues to magnify multivalent social interactions within disparate cultural settings. Examining how this tactic manifests in a worldly context is provocative. In her 1991 publication Writing Against Culture (a response to the canonical and iconic collection of cultural anthropology by James Clifford and George E. Marcus), she rejects the false dichotomy between self/other, reminding readers that we must constantly attend to the positionality of the anthropological self…and our own representations and constructions of our subjects. 

Again, her own social location(s) meant that her work was always aimed at multiple audiences – feminists, anthropologists, and non-Western scholars, among others. President Obama’s use of this strategy establishes fluidity in his own creations of meaning; he masterfully negotiates in semiotic fields of evolving interpretations. His messages, globally transmitted through sophisticated media sources, are often in collusion with the production of symbolic no-places where local, national, and transnational identities are formed, negotiated and renegotiated. For example, his ability to connect with multiple audiences is profoundly revealed in his ideological fondness for the country’s sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln. While muting the troubling historical fact that Lincoln was a devoted segregationalist, one not particularly disturbed by the economic system of slavery (clearly articulated many times - e.g. …if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it), Obama selectively promotes the image of the Great Emancipator, thus linking his own journey to an iconic but imagined figure – a journey all-at-once both visionary and cosmogonic.

The obfuscating move is powerfully effective. A mythic link to a past characterized by the bitter swill of the Civil War and segregation successfully ignites a revivalist movement, and a revisiting of an imagined point in history when the communal we faced two divergent roads. In recapturing this isolated but utopian moment, Obama completes the eternal return, leading us down a nobler path, remapping our collective trajectory, and negotiating towards the common good.  Abu-Lughod elaborates on this method of relying on notions of authenticity and the return to positive values not represented by the dominant other. But who is the Other in this vision? Our impulse, of course, is to point to the previous administration – it’s a convenient but dubious move. Obama’s own words suggest solidarity with all Americans, regardless of party or platform, especially when he compels America in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship…to brave once more the icy currents.  Arjun Appadurai’s contemporary anthropological theory demonstrates how binary categories are often negotiated and reconstructed in the disjunctive global era.

We /they cognitive structures, historically entrenched through strategic mapping of territories both geographical and institutional, have been complicated. By using his term scapes, he examines the hyper-real and its mimetic tendencies as among the ironies of global politics. Borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s nostalgia for the present, Appadurai describes the synaesthesia associated with, but clearly transforming, master narratives of colonial nation-states, resulting in the political project of managing micro-identities. The central paradox we are faced with today is that primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized. An efficient method of harnessing this disjunction is to construct a soteriological image of a mythic past, an “illo tempore,” all the while suggesting that this past may be not only collectively recaptured, but that it is indeed, "paradise lost".

Here is where we engage the Other, an avatar of our own “fallen” state. We are being encouraged, though this semiotic transmission, to form a new and holistic humanism. Leela Gandhi suggests that this process can result in a mystifying amnesia that promotes a seductive image of wholeness, but enshrouds discrete, but no less iniquitous genealogies of marginalization. Andrew Young, quoted in the January 26, 2009 edition of Time magazine, sums it up: "Barack Obama defies categorization. The fact that his father and grandfather on one side were black doesn’t make him any more of a black President than his grandfather on the other side being white would make him a white President. We claim him, and we are proud of him, but the fact is that he has not had the experiences of deprivation, humiliation and racism that I had to grow up with….he has the labels without the scars."

Navigating in these icy currents without a fixed point of destination, a stated mission, and the certainty of returning to our native shores, requires an ontological leap – whether or not we are ready and willing to make it together remains to be seen. I’m on board for now, but with an eye on the uncertain landscapes ahead, I’m not unwilling to jump.

Wendy Felese is a doctoral candidate in the joint program of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. She can be contacted at Wendy.Felese@du.edu.

Dis-enclosure and the inaugural moment

By Carl Raschke

Why do I write one day after the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama about the significance, or possibly the ultimate inconsequence, of Jean-Luc Nancy's recently translated and immediately discussed book La Déclosion (Dis-enclosure)?  Both the book and the event (and, of course, both book and event often have reciprocal, overlapping if not co-extensive qualities) can be considered specific instances of an aporia in the Derridean sense. 

First, the event.  Inauguration day represented in many ways the deconstruction of the historic text of American presidential politics, as everyone across the political spectrum from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Fox News' Bill O'Reilley seemed to acknowledge.  Contrary to much received opinion, Obama's presidency was indeed, as the former candidate himself said it was in effect, a deconstruction of the binary politics of right and left.  But the aporia itself, or what has at times been called the "moment of deconstruction", could be seen in the subtle disquietudes of the day.  Much of the inaugural crowd came to hear something approaching Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and what they got instead was a mild version of Churchill's "Blood, sweat, and tears."  The day seemed not as "inaugural" as many had hoped, yet neither was it simply replay.  It represented not so much continuity and not so much discontinuity. 

Indeed, it can be considered aporetic.  Obama was sober but hopeful, challenging yet soothing, encouraging yet minatory.  It was not a good day for the politics of desire and simulation.   Obama spoke (intimately) to the American people, as presidents on inauguration hopefully do.  But he also spoke (homiletically) to the Other.  It was the Other (specifically, in this case, the Muslim world) that he was expected to make some kind of radical gesture toward.  But the gesture to the Other was, ironically, a gesture from within the syntax of the Same; it was a gesture of engagement (Einschaltung), not necessarily changeover (Umschaltung).   It was an interposition, a moment when something happens that can be called in today's American political argot a "game changer."  An aporia. But the game isn't really changed at all.  Noticeably, the discourse of "change" fades gradually from the political lexicion, because change - not really grand change- has happened. In the discontinuity is a strange sort of continuity with the past - Obama supposedly had a less exciting than expected inauguration speech because he studied and tried to connect up carefully with the gravity and loftiness of inauguration speeches in ages past.  

Second, the book.  Reading Nancy reminds me of my first take on Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents).  Both are about what we might call "the problem of Christianity," which Continental thinkers since Heidegger, including Derrida, seem to write about in much the same manner.  Christianity become in Nancy the philosophical version of Paul's famous "thorn in the flesh," as it was in an extended sense for Freud as well.  The overfamiliarity, yet "strangeness" (Unheimlichkeit) of ohe "Christian" for pagan Europe since the time of the Greeks is Nancy's theme.  This sort of aporia is implicit in Nancy's very rhetorical question: "How did faith, one day, with the West start composing a decomposition of religion?" 

The answer of course is inseparable from the other question of why Heidegger in his project of the Destruktion of metaphysics did not consider either "religion" or "God" as philosophical problems, though he was obsessed with intimations of "divinity", not to mention a peculiar sort of eschatology developed in his Contributions to Philosophy, or the Beiträge. "Only a god can save us," Heidegger famously wrote, but salvation is from the "wink" of the so-called letzer Gott, the "last god."  The last god is not the Christian God.  The god's wink is in its withdrawal, which is at the same time a vanishing point in the Seinsgeschichte, the "history of being."  

In Heidegger, the wink is a "beckoning" (one of the more solid translations of the German word der Wink, which Heidegger uses).  For Nancy, the wink seems only possible because of a "discontent" within the Western history of metaphysics that is seeded and fomented by the Christian revelatory event, the strange and aporetic collocation of Greek piety and Semitic monotheism.  The "Christian" element in the thought of the West - Derrida's incommensurable "Jew-Greek" intertextuality - depends on this collocation. It is what makes this intertextuality unbehagen, literally "uneasy," a malaise.   There is Christian parousia in the Biblical sense (what is often rendered a "second coming"), but there is also Heidegger's which consists in the eschatological opening of Being to itself, when "all the gods have fled".  Such an opening Nancy reads as déclosion, dis-enclosure.  It is not religion without religion so much as eschatology without eschatology, or what he dubs "a faith that is nothing at all."  It is Kant's "interest of pure reason" that becomes a radical, yet finite distension, a catachresis, of the metaphysico-rational itself. 

Therein lies Christianity, according to Nancy, as "deconstruction."  "In other words, the parousia of the homousia, far from representing a difference in nature between theology and philosophy, in fact representing the infinite opening of the sense of ousia thought of as presence, a parousia of itself." That is dis-enclosure.  Nancy tries to find this new "essence" of Christianity, an exercise European philosophers and theologians have been conducting since the 18th century, in the Book of James.  As one commentator on Nancy has suggested, it comes down to "hope" without any distinguishable reason for hope. Obama reminded us too that in the midst of all the bad news we must rely on hope.  That is where we are left finally after "change."

Vattimo's "weak Christianity" now comes down descends one more notch: it becomes the West's "wink Christianity."  Perhaps we can follow Nancy's thread here and "deconstruct" Derrida himself in the former's deconstruction of Christianity.  Christianity is perhaps a metatext of the West in which its deconstruction serves as the leaven for the deconstruction of all others texts, ancient and novel.  Just as Derrida emerges through this process as a strange witness to the the both the ubiquitous operability and insuperability of khora, so through a deeper "re-Christianization" of the reading of deconstruction itself we come to its parousia, which is the same as the parousia of the West.   But isn't that what Nietzsche meant, in effect, when he declared in The Will to Power that "nihilism stands at the door" as the "strangest" (unheimlichste) of "guests?"  Contrary to Heidegger, in Nancy the nihil of nihilism is not harbored in the "forgetting" of what is kept hidden in the dialectical play of concepts throughout the tradition of Western philosohy.  The nihil is present from the beginning.   Here we have "negative theology", or perhaps a theologia crucis, written into the ontology of the West itself.  Christianity constitutes the great thread which, when pulled, rips all the other threads apart.  The death of God is not announced; is "present" ab origino.  Here ousia is "dis-enclosed", that is "crucified" in a Pauline sense (though Nancy wants to forget Paul), in its fateful parousia. 

La déclosion is, therefore, an inaugural moment, a permanent inauguration of parousia as the constant oscillation of a deconstructed politics, philosophy, theology, and all the representational structures and sign-chains in and beyond (not "outside") itself.  The "opening" of dis-enclosure, the "Open as such" - there is no "beyond" - remains a valency, for Nancy, of Deleuze's "pure immanence."   Nancy's book, however, can also be read as a kind of "dis-enclosure" of what we have come to know as the postmodern epoch.  That dis-enclosure, as in Washington, is both an eventful and somewhat less than eventful "gray morning" (in Nietzsche's phrase), an inaugural moment that wraps up so much and promises far less, promises only hope.

The only problem with such a parousia is that it remains totally "dis-enclosed" (and "enclosed" also) to itself, to the language and hopes of the West.  Nancy has committed a fateful error, which remains common among members of not just French but all the Western intelligentsia, when he declares that "Christianity is inseparable from the West."  That has already been historically disproved, particularly by Phillip Jenkins in such books as The Next Christendom.  Postmodernism is not, contra the narcissism of the new academy, a parousia in its own right, and that is why it is crucial we do, in fact, move beyond it.  I make that comment as one who has participated along with many others in an earlier "inauguration" process.   The "end" of the West may be quite visible on the horizon, as was Rome in Augustine's day, in an historical sense.  The current "global crisis" is a prophetic marker.  Nancy is wrong again when he identifies globalization with this parousia.  

Any "death of the West," which we will probably experience more fully in the next decade, constitutes simply an intertextual moment in a yet only barely glimpsed "deconstruction" of a series of texts yet to be read.  With its hyphenation the "post-modern" amounts less to the Big Kahuna of philosophy than its Big Lacuna.  And in that Lacuna a was sonst etwas, as the Germans say, is rising.  A singularity that is greater than any Heideggerian, or Nancyean, parousia.  It is not an event but an "event horizon".  That is what parousia in the "apocalyptic," if not the eschatological, sense has always meant.  Derrida understands the relationship between the spectral and the "to come" (avenir).  The West in this case is the specter, but the avenir is more, much much more.  The "discontent" (Unbehaglichkeit) of Dis-enclosure refers both to the spectrality of the specter and the venir of the avenir, its immediacy, if not its presence.  Philosophy, or any philosophical theology, is incapable of drawing the connection.

What is coming does not speak.  It rides in on the storm, as the lightning flashes from the east and goes as far as the West. 

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and is the author of various books on postmodern philosophy and religion - most recently, GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  He can be contacted at craschke@du.edu.    

Originary grammar

By Adam Katz

Originary grammar is the name I give to my work within Eric Gans’ originary hypothesis of the origin of language.  According to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerges in the midst of a crisis in which the pre-human hominid group is threatened with self-destruction through everyone’s common convergence upon some desired object.  Following Rene Girard’s account of mimetic desire, and attributing to the higher hominids the distinguishing feature of greater mimetic capacity, the originary hypothesis posits a mimetic crisis that leads to the breakdown of the animal pecking order within the group, requiring some new mode of restraint upon mimetic desire and rivalry. 

The crisis is resolved through what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation”:  mostly likely a mere moment of hesitation, which is in turn imitated by the rest of the group, situated them all before a central object that now “repels” their desire.  The destructive consequences of mimesis are thereby arrested through the transcendence of and re-articulation of mimetic activity itself and the human emerges along with the sacred (the newly inaccessible, repellent object).  The human appears as the species which poses a greater danger to itself than is presented to it by any external threat, and simultaneously as the being capable of deferring that danger through the signifying relation to sacred Being.  Representation is the deferral of violence—not merely the kind of local violence of which we will probably never be rid, but the kind of contagious, immolating violence between which and ourselves we will never cease to interpose whatever signs we can cobble together when needed.

The originary hypothesis cannot be “proven,” of course:  there will never be any archeological or biological evidence supporting it.  Its confirmation lies in the power with which it enables us to make sense of human things, on the one hand, but also in the very plausibility of positing some origin to language.  In other words, if language must have emerged as a whole, “as such,” with everything transformed from a condition of non-meaning to meaning; in a word, if language must have emerged in an event, then we can hypothesize more or less meaningfully regarding the constitution of such an event.  And, indeed, the fact that we couldn’t consider the possibility of a “piece” of a sign—either there is a sign or there isn’t—speaks strongly in favor of some kind of leap from a world without signs to a signifying world. It further makes sense to assume that such an event could not have been a trivial one—the existence of the group and each of its members must have been strongly apprehended by all to have been at stake. 

Our posited event must presuppose a situation which the existing means of resolving conflicts could not address.  The resolution must then draw upon while transforming existing capacities of the species.  Our hypothesis cannot presuppose capacities that only language could have bestowed upon us, nor can we introduce any elements into the originary event that wouldn’t be fully explicable in terms of what we can reasonably presuppose.  The event in question must enable us to account for the sign’s transcendence:  to put it simply, we must be able to account for what Saussure designated with the signifier/signified distinction:  the fact that any sign remains in some sense the “same” sign, regardless of the different situations in which it is deployed, and that this sameness has nothing to do with its physical features. 

The ostensive gesture put forth on the originary scene, upon which the object is “named” God (he-who-commands-us-to-renounce-immediate-appropriation; or something along those lines), in its iterability and the non-availability of its referent enables us to account for the immateriality of the sign.  The ostensive gesture, that is, “means” only to the extent that all members of the group willingly participate in the event of its meaning by iterating the word of God.  

To use the word “willingly” as I just have brings to light some of the more provocative questions generated by the hypothesis.  On some level, everyone on the scene must “know” what they are doing:  each must see the others iterating the gesture of aborted appropriation and each must “authenticate” the gesture. 

But we could not posit some declarative, propositional intent to such a gesture, as in:  I am pledging to you my intention to renounce possession of the object and any assault upon your person in the hope that you will do the same, along with everyone else… (We can’t have language before we have language…)  To the extent that we try to convey the meaning of the gesture to the scene’s participants, we would have to do so in terms of a “feeling,” or what Charles Sanders Peirce called “firstness”:  the experience of the thing as it is, without any reference to anything outside of it or outside of that experience of it. 

On one side of the gesture is a sense of continuity, of sustenance, of life, of Being; on the other side is annihilation.  As sign users, we are tacitly aware of this distinction, and this distinction is iterated every time something “makes sense” to us.  We know much more than we can tell, as Michael Polanyi puts it, and we are beings of the event—indeed, for humans, there is nothing but events (overlapping events, events within events, events referencing other events, to be sure, but nothing but events).  And we both create and are created by, act in and suffer the event.  We cannot know in advance what might successfully defer the violence activated by the convergence upon some central object of desire in any specific case; indeed, what would be the “measuring stick” for determining the degree, much less quality, of desire and resentment implicated in some such convergence?—and yet we are able to “come up with” something that sometimes works.  And, of course, sometimes doesn’t—there was nothing inevitable about the originary scene, nor is there about our indefinite continuance as a species.

There is a politics of the originary hypothesis:  a politics of the center, one that can accommodate much of what we now designate “left” and “right” and hopefully much more as well.  Human history is a continual struggle for liberation from the singular, irreplaceable object at the center of the originary scene, toward ever more substitutable, dispersed and exchangeable objects.  At the same time the center must be attended to, even if that center is no more than the contingent moral and political guarantees of a set of loose, evolving and largely tacit rules regulating the status and accessibility of the evolving world of objects.  Maximal freedom to produce, exchange and consume objects (with ever looser definitions of what counts as an “object”) is articulated in increasingly complex ways with networks of associations, constitutions, contracts, covenants, habits and laws needed to condition those exchanges and manage all of the desires and resentments produced by new degrees of freedom.  And there is resentment generated by the “system” of exchange itself, a resentment which we might call “victimary,” which reads the inevitable inequalities and instability generated by the millions upon millions of daily exchanges as a disguise concealing the actual consolidation of power of some small, corrupt, insidious and ingenious elite. 

This type of “totalizing” resentment gave us the Communist and Fascist insurgencies of the 20th century, as well as the current Islamic supremacist-led Global Intifada. There are less virulent versions as well:  indeed, some level of victimary resentment seems to be the “enterprise cost” of the exchange system itself.  We might call the politics of the originary hypothesis “liberal,” in the 19th century sense combining civil liberties and free market economics; at the same time it is a future oriented politics always on the alert for what the political theorist Frank Ankersmit has called the “creative compromises” that resolve seemingly intractable conflicts by producing new rules and that are especially characteristic of the type of social order we have come to call “liberal democracies.”  (In subsequent posts I will distinguish my own politics and my own reading of contemporary events within the broad space I am constructing here within which dialogues over the meaning of the originary scene could gather around themselves various political meanings and consequences.)

As for the “grammar,” I will also return to this question in the more literal sense of the generation of sentences and other relations between words and signs and reality, but for now, consider that the originary sign on the scene as I have accounted for it has a doubled mode of operation:  it initiates and seals the scene from within the scene; and, it represents the sacred object to those congregated on the scene, thereby simultaneously constituting the scene through its relation to some externality.  We have, that is, an internal and emergent system of references that draws its power from and, indeed, roughly imitates, an unmolested and presumably invulnerable reified center. 

In that case, the latter, representational operation of the sign names a limiting reality which demands acknowledgement, while the former, circulatory operation of the sign relies upon the sign’s iterability (its “imperfect” dissemination through the scene) and therefore its variability and generative power.  We can expect to find these two operations in any act of making meaning, then, as the noun names the sub-stance and the verb completes the event by making the named object peripatetic:  as Gertrude Stein asserted, what is interesting about verbs is that it is so easy to make mistakes with them, which opens up the possibility of generality by way of “error” (inappropriate rule application) and thus difference and novelty.

Adam Katz teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.  He is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis:  A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry and an editor of Anthropoetics, the on-line journal of Generative Anthropology.

The Business of the Real and the Unreality of Business

By Victor Taylor

In the past few months we have heard the gruesome details of various business failures across the American and global economies, which, in a certain respect, is even more terrifying than the actual occurrence of the disasters themselves.  It is awful that bad things happen; we accept this as a fact of life; however, when bad things happen and it slowly begins under someone’s nose, then the merely awful becomes the tragic—preventable disaster.  Why didn’t the government repair the levees in New Orleans before Katrina?  Or, why didn’t someone tell us that there were no WMD in Iraq?  Actually, someone did, but the reader gets my point.

The recent global collapse of various business sectors, I will argue, should not be seen in this light.  Yes, the circumstances that led up to the ruin of parts of the banking and financial sectors did begin under the noses of those in power.  This is not the same as the levees in New Orleans, however.  No one fixed the levees because government (state and/or federal) was lazy and/or incompetent and/or out of money.  Perhaps there was even some malicious and willful neglect.  Who knows?  The banking and financial problems, which are the “heart of the system,” however, were not problems to be fixed or covered up; they were “problems” that made a lot of people a lot of money. 

So, the banking and financial meltdown is very much like an ATM malfunctioning.  Yeah, it is broken, but it keeps spitting out money and lots of it!  My point here is very simple.  There isn’t a “problem” within business at all—the problem is business.  The broken ATM, using this analogy, only becomes a “problem” for everyone else when it STOPS spitting out money, which it did.

Why is it important to “re-assign” the problem here?  I can answer this fairly succinctly.  Maintaining that the meltdown is a “problem” presumes that something went wrong, which means that there is a state of affairs in which things go “right.”  This isn’t true.  The great charade of business is that it is ordered, rational, manageable, and predictable.  The falsity of this belief is painfully obvious in the bailout project headed by “Hank” Paulson—where did the billions go and why hasn’t it helped? 

This myth also became glaringly obvious when former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan appeared “dumbfounded” at a congressional hearing about the mortgage “crisis.”  He didn’t “know” how it could have happened.  In other words, reality didn’t obey the metaphysico-economic “laws” divined by him and the lending industry.  Business (and this is the problem)  is presumed to “know” (the Real) and if we continue to allow it to “fix” itself and affirm its own myth of the Real that it perpetrates on us we will also continue to suffer. 

Let us look at the academy as a case in point—BRU, Business Real University.  Business and academia have always been at odds.  Frank Donoghue in his recent book entitled The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities describe an unpleasant history in which business leaders have traditionally denigrated the “knowledge producing” function of the academy.  Andrew Carnegie is an example par excellence.  In an 1891 commencement address at the Pierce College of Business and Shorthand of Philadelphia, Carnegie ridiculed the “liberal arts” and celebrated the fact that the graduates of PCBS had not wasted their time studying “dead languages” or “Shakespeare” (4).  Instead, he proclaimed, they had spent their time wisely, learning something practical, “shorthand” and “typing.” 

The story that Donoghue tells becomes even more horrifying after Carnegie.  Business leaders, as Donoghue tells it, “invested” in colleges and universities not to advance education but to thwart education, especially a liberal arts education.  Clarence F. Birdseye, of frozen food fame, published Individual Training in Our Colleges, a pamphlet that chastised academia for its failure to operate on a business model, with colleges understood as “factories” and students as “products” (5).  What would Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Birdseye say now?  Given the global business crisis today, would we really want colleges and universities to be “factories”?  Had colleges and universities completely transformed into factories, as many business leaders would have preferred, we wouldn’t have colleges or universities—just like we don’t have factories or many of them today.  My point here is simple. 

Business, for more than a century, has claimed to have a metaphysical and epistemological “leg up” on everyone else when it comes to knowledge of the Real.  Business leaders, even today, oversee, more or less, the “real world” to which the academic “fake world” is totally irrelevant except for its ceremonial function.  So, not only do we have massive fraud within business, at the heart of business in the banking and financial sectors, we have the fraud of and as business—its “myth of the Real” that dictates nearly every aspect of our lives. 

The global “business” collapse, then, should give us pause.  Do we really want to endorse and have confidence in business’s metaphysical command over the Real?  Greed, fraud, and incompetence seem to be the ingredients of “business-reality” and, in the end, the only business-metaphysics ever demonstrated was that it didn’t know at all.  Or, it demonstrated that what it did know was meaningless.           

As metaphysico-business constricts and determines “Reality” more restrictively, colleges and universities must open new “markets” and find new “branding” opportunities for themselves.  With “knowledge” as knowledge only if it is “marketable,” colleges and universities must become “polymorphously perverse,” creating various sites of “pleasure” for students in the form of cruise ship like amenities.  So, when people criticize the “Club-Ed” facilities of a college or university, one should point back to business and say, “They have so restricted what counts as knowledge that we have to now ‘sell’ pleasure to get by.”  Instead of fighting over the “Real” or advocating for a more diverse understanding of knowledge, colleges and universities have reacted to metaphysico-business by becoming “anti-business businesses,” aka the entertainment sector. 

So, read Shakespeare and simply ENJOY it!  Come to college and have FUN!  What has been the upshot of this?  Colleges and universities have come to see themselves as “retail” spaces, with every square inch featuring a price tag—makeshift sweatshirt and T-shirt stands at graduation.  My late friend and professor Bill Readings in The University in Ruins described this as a conversation of people from members of a community to “customers.”  So, not only does metaphysico-business tell us how and where to spend money, it tells us what has and doesn’t have “value.”  Members of a community don’t have “value” and customers do.  The liberal arts as “enjoyment” has “value” and the liberal arts as “knowledge” does not. 

Not only have we known that business, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, we more recently have come to know that business doesn’t even know what it is supposed to know—cost.  We accepted the former because we thought it was a necessary evil—an unfortunate or dirty trade-off.  But the latter realization . . . the realization that business can’t even “account” for its own accounting . . . its metaphysical claim to a superiority of knowledge of Real . . . is the great shock or should be.  We always knew that business failed to see value beyond “marketability,” but now we know that business cannot even assure us that its core Reality is something it can manage.

Business, therefore, fails at business.  Its greatest failure of all! 

The current global crisis should give academy dwellers an opportunity to challenge business’ claim to know the Real.  This could become an enormous deconstructive maneuver, with academics pointing out an important fact; not that business doesn’t understand the value of “education” (which it doesn’t), but that it doesn’t even understand the “cost.”  We may find top executive on our side, for once.  Former mega-CEO Carly Fiorina has called for a comprehensive overhaul of popular business models, e.g. short term stock price blindness.  In other words, Fiorina and Mitt Romney, may be inviting us to conclude that business doesn’t know the Real as well as it claims.  Again, business fails as business.

My next blog post will focus on the “value model” university:  “If They Can’t Run Themselves, How Can They Run Us?”

Victor Taylor is the author of Religion After Postmodernism (University of Virginia Press).  He lives in Pennsylvania.    

Hot Abstinence

By Colbey Emmerson Reid

In Twilight, Summit Entertainment’s new teen vampire movie based on the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s four-part series, Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, The Nativity Story) rescues a banal romance by stylizing the novel’s overwrought prose as operatic and its clichés as Romantic archetypes. Hardwicke’s prolonged “quoting” of Meyer’s novel in the film thereby both perfectly replicates the original text and thoroughly departs from it, turning a chronologically straightforward story devoted to old-fashioned values like beauty, transcendence and the union of soul-mates into something avant-garde, experimental, even postmodern.

The film is a long quote that forms a new narrative precisely through its pretense of devotion to the original. The new narrative, I’ll argue, is a myth for the subjects of global recession, a theory not only representing but explaining the paradox of lush asceticism that can be found but lacks context in the original novel.

Twilight uses form to explain Twilight, whereas the latter is content merely to exist.  Few critics of the film have observed the translation, but almost all of them at least mention their consensus that the story, which was written by a Mormon mother of three, is an “abstinence narrative.” They mean that its chaste lovers, Bella and Edward, can be understood as glamorizing the reactionary culture of abstinence in which girls vow to remain chastely “wed” to their fathers until marriage and boys view sex with their girlfriends as a form of incest, a failure to behave with them the way they’d want their future daughters to be treated.

And in fact, young Bella plays the wife to her divorced father, cooking him dinner, keeping house, and in a last-ditched effort to stun him into permitting a mid-night flight from the state with her vampire boyfriend (not for sex; there is danger), repeats the words her mother said when she left her father. At that moment Bella becomes her father’s wife, and in the film we see her specter in his expression when Bella quotes her mother.

Edward, Bella’s boyfriend, also treats her as a daughter, telling her that his life has become about protecting her life, and saving his metaphorical toddler (Bella is a klutz, perpetually toddling towards accidents) from endless peril. He doesn’t complain about the infantile state of his “mate” (Meyer’s word for vampire’s lovers) because it reflects the nature of his passion for her, not its obstacle. Nor, of course, does he have sex with Bella, an act during which he might forget his paternal function and become a (sexual) predator, fulfilling his impulse to rip into his “daughter” like she’s a luau pig: this is a vampire movie, so naturally the beloved is troped as dinner and it is up to Edward to keep the feast family-style.  

This is the primly medieval construction of love that Hardwicke is given to work with, but her film hardly preaches philistinism or virtue. Twilight is anachronistically faithful to beauty: it’s everywhere, in everyone—even those who, like Bella, don’t know that it’s in them (this despite the handy caption of her name). Faith in beauty is part of the novel, which explains that vampires avoid the sun because they sparkle in direct light and describes Bella’s awe when Edward exposes himself to it for her benefit (is this the “engagement” in the abstinence narrative? He glitters like a man-sized diamond, the commodity standing in for his flesh. Bella’s struck breathless, miming orgasm. The spectator of multi-carat loveliness is permitted to appreciate it enthusiastically).

For many readers, the total lack of irony in Meyer’s representations of beauty is unbearable; one blogger, spoofing what a Twilight sex scene might be like, depicts Edward telling Bella confidentially that “[vampires] ejaculate rainbows.” Hardwicke, however, implicates viewers of the film within the book’s devotion to beauty; that is, she makes a pretty picture. Her camera almost never loses its close-up grip on the actors, whose beauty has been heavily marketed. When the camera draws back, it is to reveal an exquisite Northwest panorama. All of the exchanges between the lovers are highly choreographed, and the perpetual fog and drizzle of Forks, Washington (Portland in the film) creates the weatherly equivalent of an eternally soft-focused lens.

Which is to say that Hardwicke’s representation of abstinence doesn’t check what Lacan would call jouissance, meaning that the lovers’ asceticism provides uncontrollable delight so intense that it is experienced as suffering. Nobody understands jouissance better than Edward, who kisses Bella and immediately explodes in a climax that literally propels him away from her, and he hits her bedroom wall hard.

The violence of the moment is a pleasurable separation; to move away is to climax. Meyer explains this concept almost immediately in the book, when on Bella and Edward’s first encounter in biology class Edward covers his nose and looks sick when she sits down next to him. He writhes uncomfortably and glowers during all their brief encounters; there’s clearly something wrong with the boy. He does all he can to get away from her, even asking a high school administrator for a schedule change.

Bella is befuddled, she sniffs her armpit and wonders what could possibly be causing her lab partner to suffer visible pain when he’s around her. Then finally it is revealed: he’s wriggling and grimacing with pleasure, because Bella smells delectable. This notion of the erotic nature of denial is recognized by Susan Squire when in her book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage (Bloomsbury Press: NY, 2008), Squire concludes a chapter on the manifold forms of self-punishment engaged in by medieval married couples with precisely the Twilight-paradox: “In some ways it’s a wonder that the paradoxes of Christian wedlock don’t lead to universal celibacy…—but then again, with all that forbidden fruit the Church has defined and described, with so many rules and so many ways to transgress them, from the sublime to the ridiculous, it’s possible that marital relations have never been hotter” (124).

Probably unintentionally, reading Twilight has a similar effect. The plot is compelling, but its rendition is excruciating. Reading becomes jouissance, because you can’t put the book down but you really want to. Hardwicke uses form to provide distance, so her viewers can see the characters as discourse. The tactic allows us to take them seriously, which is precisely what critics who read the film as a relic of social conservatism don’t do. Their approach collapses Hardwicke into Meyer, and is driven, paradoxically, by their adoption of the lack of critical distance within the book.

Its absence only permits them to access the text through its content, by which they are repelled: a pretty young girl meets a handsome boy and instead of “doing it” 90210-style, they promise never to lose control, but instead to tame all sexual energy by projecting it into civilized plaisirs: conversation, family dinners, and art. Edward introduces Bella to Classical music, and she ceases to speak naturally, instead thinking in highly constructed “verses” we might call (bad) poetry—this quote appears in verse on the back cover of the Little, Brown paperback:
About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him— and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be— that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Occasionally Edward waxes bestial, climbing trees like a puma with Bella on his back, but this always turns out to be a necessary means to achieve a tame aesthetic end: Edward wants to show her the view. In this reading, insofar as abstinence is represented as pleasurable it is a function of the super-ego, which drives the characters to derive a moral satisfaction from punishing themselves. In the film, however, the distance provided by Hardwicke’s highlighting of the story as myth, the characters as discourse, constructs a text that contains its own critical distance.

It’s not, therefore, embarrassing to watch, and what we see there is another take on abstinence as the aesthetics of, to borrow Leo Bersani’s term, self-shattering. This version of abstinence actually proliferates sex, or rather, it increases what Frances Ferguson has called, in another context, “the sexiness of sex.”

Whereas Meyer’s book treats abstinence culturally, and shows us characters who have fully and unconsciously interpolated the moral demand for self-denial, Hardwicke’s film treats abstinence within the Romantic conventions signaled by the movie’s form. Here, asceticism constructs a sublime subject breaking down at the crossroads between—in the twilight of—pleasure and pain. Her Bella and Edward are forbidden one another, like Romeo and Juliet (which Bella is revealed to have memorized in New Moon, the second book in the series), but forbearance is likened to savoring sweets a little at a time, lingering over a meal, putting off the best part for last in a string of events that never can conclude.

Waiting and withholding here construct passive subjects (Edward, appropriately, is dead—and Bella, in her love for him, wants to be), but their passivity is a means of signifying outside the cultural paradigm. The great irony, however, is that Hardwicke’s transformation of Twilight’s prosaic, plodding failure into Twilight’s mythopoetic resonance renders the film a text for a culture in transformation, one still in the twilight of change.

Hardwicke sees in the novel an opportunity to represent a shift, away from the capitalist model of pleasure as utilitarian self-gratification through a sexual act that always has the symbolic potential for reproduction, and toward a post-capitalist model of ascetic jouissance, sex-as-the-surplus of reproductive value. And herein the appeal of the vampire myth: that another kind of subject is born when it dies (Edward), or loses the will to live (Bella), or simply—as Hardwicke invites us to—experiences these negations as enjoyment. The story might be the latest and greatest instance of the notorious American puritan spirit, but as Squire suggests about religious constructions of marital abstinence it’s possible that Puritanism has never been hotter.

Colbey Emmerson Reid is Assistant Professor of Modern Literature Department of English and Humanities York College of Pennsylvania.  She can be reached at creid@ycp.edu. 

Multiplying Homonyms

By Artur Sebastian Rosman

It may be that the history of thought is a history of misreadings, but there is no need to proliferate misreadings for the sake of misreadings.  Clarity of thought, whenever it is possible, is preferable to sloppy thinking.  Or is that too presumptuous? 

Thinking about the Titanic missing the iceberg does have its merits, although it is much more fascinating and thought-provoking to see the ship hit that clear mountain of ice.  In the same way a polemic gains clarity through the definition of its terms, because such definition facilitates a head-on clash of ideas that might lead to a more transparent dialogue.

A case in point is the intellectual non-collision which occurred on the pages of JCRT 9.2.  The Titanic of Crockett's response completely missed the iceberg of Bielik-Robson's critique.  In large part they evaded each other because of their homonymous use of the term "theology."

The concept of "homonymy" is something that I lifted from Alexandre Leupin's Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology and Literature in the Middle-Ages.  He happened to lift it from Kojeve.  Homonymy is a situation where, "a single word designates different ideas and things in a conceptual reapportionment” (Leupin, Fiction and Incarnation xv).

The most stereotypical example is the modern vs. the pre-modern concept of time.  It is argued that the modern understanding of time is dynamic and highlights becoming, whereas the medieval understanding of time tended toward a static, eternalizing, understanding of time.  These two concepts of time are so radically different that two different terms should be used for them.  But since there is no consensus on such terms, we must deal with homonymy whenever the word "time" is used to designate both of these distinct phenomena and worldviews.      

These ruptures in meaning are something that Bielik-Robson seems to understand better than Crockett.  Her critical response to Crockett's Interstices of the Sublime is an exercise in sifting out homonymous uses of the word "theology."  Right from the gun she points to a case of homonymy, "the psychoanalytic sublime wanders off, in a typically Freudian anarchic style of Sinnwandlung, into strange regions that not only defy concepts of traditional theology, but also, at much more fundamental level, defy its affects."

In the final count she distinguished at least four meanings of "theology" in her essay: Crockett's psychotheology (characterized by “petrifying” negativity), Levinas' messianic theology, traditional theology as represented by Radical Orthodoxy, and a theology of the dynamic sublime.

On the other hand, Crockett appears to reject both messianic theology and traditional theology as impracticable.  Furthermore, he argues that Bielik-Robson's characterization of his thought as a theology of the purely negative mathematical sublime misses the point.  Crockett does this by articulating his postmodern psychotheology of the sublime, thereby uncovering homonymy within theologies of the sublime themselves: "the modern sublime essentially represents the aesthetic formlessness that opposes the form of traditional religious belief and practice, but the key to the postmodern sublime is that it indicates a proliferation of forms rather than a simple absence of them."

In all fairness, the dissonance within the debate was not simply caused by homonyms.  Crockett was correct in pointing out that the sublime is a dynamic process, however, the passages from his books utilized by Bielik-Robson seemed to show that Crockett’s writings stick a stick into the spokes of the sublime’s dynamism, halting it in the negative moment.

This dissonance between the two positions cannot be harmonized until I can give Crockett's books a close read.  The latter is something Crockett should have done with his critic’s last name, as it is misspelled throughout his response.  Distinctions really do make a difference.

Artur S. Rosman is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Washington.

A new project for correlational/Continental theology (again)

By Wilson Dickinson

I was still in college during the 2000 presidential election, when the American democratic process was seemingly dissolving in front of our eyes.  While it was spoken about several times in a religion course I was taking, a friend of mine told me that the professor of his “Introduction to Political Science” class had yet to mention it and, instead, had stuck to the outline of his old yellow notes.  Given the events of this week, and the focus of this blog since its recent inception, I must warn you that this post is at risk of doing much the same, sticking to what I had planned to write on and excluding myself from the more pressing and important conversations of the day. 

Yet, this backdrop of political concern and engagement is not something that is limited to this week or this blog, but it seems to have become the primary focus of scholarship at the fruitful nexus of continental philosophy and theology for the last couple of years (if not decades).  While I have followed this trend with great interest, I would like to propose a new (and I would argue complementary) agenda or project for this field. 

Simply put, it seems as though continental philosophy and theology have much to learn from some recent developments in cultural and historical studies.  Such theologians and philosophers will most likely find themselves quite at home with these insights, as it was continental philosophy (read as “theory” in other departments) that loosened up the categories of historical and cultural analysis.  While these other “fields” have attempted to return the favor, these contributions seem to often fall on deaf ears.  It is as though the philosophical dynamism of Derrida is replaced by the categories of Harnack when one begins to speak about particular religious identities or historical situations. 

Though this is undoubtedly an oversimplification, I would argue that the treatment of religious and historical categories and traditions is often a largely neglected aspect of the theology of this vein and that a more intentional consideration and interaction with these studies would be greatly beneficial.  (Readers of the JCRT will certainly detect that there is nothing new about this, as Clayton Crockett and Jeffery Robbins made similar suggestions in their manifestos for the journal in 2004.  More on this below.)

I am primarily interested in the manner in which a number of central categories are being rethought and de-naturalized.  The most obvious of these is the category of “religion.”  While this has certainly not been lost on continental philosophers and theologians (as exemplified by the work of Derrida and Hent de Vries), the work of Talal Asad and others has still not received the attention that it deserves.  Despite several notable and varying exceptions, the uncritical use of the category of religion still seems to be defining and limiting the task of theology behind its back. 

Questioning the concept of religion as it relates to theology opens up an entire nest of interrelated categories.  Among them I would list “orthodoxy” (see Daniel Boyarin, Rebecca Lyman, and Virginia Burrus), “Europe” (see Edward Said, Dispesh Chakrabarty, and Gil Anidjar), “secularism” (see Asad again), “philosophy” (see Pierre Hadot and Andrea Nightingale), “the mystical” (see Richard King and Grace Jantzen) and “Platonism” (see Patricia Cox Miller and Michael Sells).

In arguing for the importance of these works I am not merely advocating that theologians and philosophers update their libraries or make their work conform to the trends and content of “social theory.”  These cultural and historical studies seem to often import contradictions of their own, as the norms of scholarship (meaning the conformity to a certain structure, method, and authorial voice) seem to rely on an epistemological schema that is antagonistic to the complications and ambiguities with which they characterize their “content.”  Therefore, I am not arguing for a simple division of labor in which theologians update their data with the newest historical findings.  Instead, I am hoping that such a focus will demand a more direct treatment of the division between form and content that often trips up philosophy of religion and theology. 

An example of this can be found in a criticism often waged against modes of theology that follow the lead of Derrida.  This critique declares that he has a largely formalized account of religion, and that any work following his account can never be properly theological because it will always assume the emptying out of any “confessional content.”  So long as one maintains 19th century religious and theological categories, this risk seems to remain quite serious.  If one, however, rethinks the very parameters of religious identity, orthodoxy, etc. then such a charge seems to lose its footing.  (I would argue that this understanding of “confessional religion” is not itself “natural” or “universal”, but that it too can be historically and culturally located.  This does not preclude its viability or persuasiveness, but it does mean that it is not the only option.) 

Not only could this work begin to de-sediment a number of rigid categories that are inimically antagonistic to many aspects of the larger projects of continental philosophy and theology, but it can also serve to open up a positive space in which these theological voices can begin to both speak more freely and be attentive to the textures and complexity of traditions.  Such a project remains largely in line with Crockett’s and Robbins’ aforementioned formulations.  The primary difference here seems to be that what I am calling for draws from sources beyond the Chicago school of the History of Religions (Crockett) and is more concerned with a transformed relationship with theological traditions rather than moving into an entirely new and theoretical space (Robbins). 

Rather than emphasizing the theoretical role of theology, I see a practical and performative opening which extends theology beyond the private sphere to which it has been relegated under many modern frames.  This is particularly relevant in regards to those traditions and aspects of theology that have been compartmentalized under the headings of “mysticism” and “spirituality.”  By contesting the frames listed above, one may find a new opening for constructive theologies that have “spiritual,” political, and public importance.  If I am able to make this move, perhaps sticking to the old yellow notes and addressing the issues of the day need not be mutually exclusive activities.

Wilson Dickinson is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University.

The morning after - with a nod to Vince Lombardi

By Carl Raschke

I will make this brief as a follow-up to the much longer and perhaps somewhat brooding post below.  The results are in.  Barack Obama is president.  I just came back from Chicago, where they were all celebrating.  It is a giddy feeling.  President-elect Obama gave a victory speech last night worthy of even the best moments of John F. Kennedy.  I doubt that anyone who really reads this blog isn't celebrating as well, but we must forget that we are not the whole country. We are the intelligentsia; we are not the world.  Not all of America, not all of the world.  Obama had the wisdom to recognize, and acknowledge, that fact in a powerful way.  That is most hopeful.  I myself believe Obama himself will be a real leader, but leaders can only lead when those who are led also are willing to rise to the best that not only their leaders demand of them, but that they demand of themselves.  "Change" has been the mantra for eighteen months.  Change has now happened.  But the world is changing faster.  The euphoria and the well-wishing and the hopefulness will evaporate very quickly. We must remember that George Bush himself had a 90 percent approval rating right after September 11, 2001.  And Obama only received about the same percentage of the popular vote as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan did when they were first elected. 

It is time that we all put aside whatever fantasies we have about what our leaders can do for us, and start thinking hard about what we need to do for ourselves, in spite of ourselves, and as work on ourselves so that our new leader can truly lead.  My last post reminded us of the truly dark side of ourselves on all sides that we have seen in this election.  It is time we stop blaming "them" for things that don't go right and begin to try to understand what we're all up against.  For example, many of us blithely assumed that the McNasties of the world might also welcome the victory of someone who said he was willing to talk with anyone and hear their point of view - I'm thinking of Russia and Iran - but this morning public statements from both those regimes seemed even more menacing than they had been toward George W. Bush.  We can't blame Bush any longer, nor capitalism - whatever is left of it - nor the Democrats nor the Republicans nor the liberals nor the conservatives.  We've got to take a hard and nuanced look at ourselves and our situation.

We have, to paraphrase and somewhat distort Nietzsche, set sail on a vast and stormy ocean of what we call the "global era" in a small and fairly fragile boat.  It won't be too long before a big wave hits, and then what?  Are we quickly disillusioned, or do we in our own way remind ourselves of the famous saying of Vince Lombardi - "when the going gets tough, the tough gets going."

We're jubilant now, because postive change, or at least the semblance of it, seems to have happened.  But what happens when the change is negative, or perhaps catastrophic?  Do we find another scapegoat, especially our new leader, or do we assume - ridiculously - that the big wave won't hit.  Of course it will.  Or do we cry out "all hands on deck" and tackle the storm together?

It wasn't even 8 a.m. before the sky was flashing.           

Apocalypse now? The subaltern has spoken.

By Carl Raschke

I write this blog one day before the 2008 presidential election, not only because there was an unexpected hole in the schedule of bloggers this fall, but because I wanted to offer these observations before the actual electoral outcome is determined.  I will steadfastly refuse to weigh in with a political opinion on who I personally think should be elected, mainly because as a 501(c) 3 the non-profit organization that sponsors JCRT and this blog is forbidden from doing so.  At the same time, this election has effectively gone on for almost two years and totally dominated the passions and public consciousness of America, and I can say that I will personally be more than happy when it is over.  It's sort of like the two weeks I spent in Vienna this past June with a "travel class" from my own university. 

We arrived just about the day what German speakers call die Meisterschaft, or "championship" - opened in that city.  It was still going on when we left, and on my next stop in Amsterdam, where I was planning to visit with my son and family, who live there, it was still going on, at least on the television to which every Dutch citizen glued their gazes in the evening  - as was the case earlier with Austrian citizens and the tens of thousands of curiosity-seekers, beer-sotted fans, and news observers who had crowded into Vienna to participate in some manner.  Die Meisterschaft,  of course, is the European soccer bacchanalia that takes place every four years in some fortunate, or unfortunate, city on the Continent.  Every national team plays every other national team in a protracted, elimination contest that generates far more passion, and bad public behavior, than one could ever generate for the Olmypics.  For the first five days watching Germans, Croats, Turks, and Portuguese paint their faces patriotic colors, swarm and bellow chants in their native languages like some frenzied ratpack in the city's official "fanzone" was exciting and even amusing.  After a week it became not only tedious, but depressing.  The same can be said for the election.

After the national party conventions it became painfully obvious that the "bi-partisan" mantra of "post-partisan" politics was more exactly the fraud that everyone hoped it was not.  This election is more partisan than it has ever been.  In an age when the nation remains wretchedly divided ideologically, regionally, and culturally, I suppose that we should be thankful that to date it's only become a lot of nasty name-calling and opponent-baiting.  But there are troubling signs not evidence in elections of yore, even during the close, but vicious, 2004 contest between Bush and Kerry.  We no longer have "swift boaters," but we have effigies of candidates in both parties boldly and proudly hung in public by nooses.  Calling Obama the "anti-Christ" is gaining serious traction among some respectable preachers and fundamentalist email chain-mailers in the Bible Belt.  Even during the Clinton impeachment hearings in the late 1990s hearings that sentiment was never really heard.  Former Clinton operative and CNN pundit James Carville seriously predicted rioting if Obama somehow didn't make it to the White House.  Amd just four days before the election long-forgotten, aging Sixties rad-diva Erica Jong caused a global sensation when she told an Italian daily newspaper that "blood will run in the streets" and that a "second Civil War" was in the offing unless Obama won on Tuesday. 

What is going on?  The right, which seems to have co-opted much of John McCain's message, has honed its "the Marxists are coming, the Marxists are coming" battle cry.  The left, which seems equally paranoid and obtuse and just doesn't get the fact that somebody like Sarah Palin can become a real political force in this country, mainly because they've never bothered to try to understood real people, has dusted off once again the "vast right-wing conspiracy."  Even Cindy Sheehan, who is running against Nancy Pelosi presumably to her left, getting vandalized.   Both parties have crafted their message fairly forcefully and consistently, and both parties seem at least to agree on a common theme - "apocalypse now".

The big and scary and complex global financial crisis of the last seven weeks, whose etiology defies even the superficial logic of the endless and tiresome stump speeches, has of course contributed to the current mood of anxiety bordering on confusion bordering on panic bordering on a sense of impending disaster.  Unfortunately, it's safe to say that whoever wins at this point - and all the polls and pseudo-polls indicate it's going to be relatively close - could easily appear to the legions of l'autre as the occasion for apocalypse.  That's how these sorts of things get started.  At this point I'm not making any predictions, except it's safe to say that the mood out there, whatever demographic slice you slice and dice, is downright ugly. 

The key indicator is not what McCain or Obama has actually promised, or threatened, to do, whether in fact or according to some trance-like delusion, but the well-documented fact that the smallest portion of the population since polls stated to be taken is grievously unhappy with "the direction of the country."  If all those unhappy people were somehow a majority of the like-minded, it would be one thing.  But they're all unhappy about a lot of different things, the most important of which is the economy, and their " rage", as some commentators have fallen into the habit of calling it, is vectored in mutually contradictory directions.  This election could end up like the two offended pistol duelers who turn and pull the trigger at exactly at the same time and both collapse dead at once.  The "blood" in the street in this case could be everybody's.        

I hope I'm wrong.  We'll know soon.  But what's more important than the actual vote count on Tuesday is some recognition of what's really at stake here. As Michael Mandel argues in the latest issue of Business Week, the problem is not really a "crisis of confidence" in either the politicians or the world financial system.  It's the global economic system which has been evolving willy-nilly in the last two decades and has reached an inevitable and logical point of "crisis," as Karl Marx - not to be confused with most of today's idiot savant "cultural Marxists" - would himself have foreseen.  The crisis has evolved since formerly Marxist countries began after the collapse of the Soviet Union - actually in China after the death of Mao - to accumulate "capital" by adopting a sophisticated and somewhat atavistic strategy of mercantilism while the "capitalist" West in general, and America in particular, shed any pretense at all of accumulating "capital" through negative savings, bankrupting military adventures, and an orgy of low-interest, credit-crazed consumerism. 

If in Marx's definition, a capitalist is the one who hogs all the surplus value, it ain't even America's Fortune 500 any longer.  It's the guys who own all the currency reserves, and the honor right now goes to those verry guys who just a generation ago were waving Mao's little red books.  I mean, of course, the Chinese. In other words, the former Marxists are aufgehoben as capitalists, and the former capitalists are aufegehoben as Marxists, even George Bush to a minor extent, as we say in the case of the Great Bank Bailout otherwise known as the Great Global Train Robbery. 

Before our postmodernist sensibilities lurch too far toward pulling a Lazarus on Marx and Engels in light of the present new world disorder, it might be useful to sober up on a little post-colonialist theory which can serve as a damper for any post-Derridean, neo-Jamesonian "revolutionary" ardor, as Lacan functioned not too many years ago for the fantasy of the triumphal Hegelian/Sartrean subject.  Post-colonial theory, which our au courant philosophers and our "theologians" rarely read these days, if they read it at all, has served to interrogate and dislocate every possible ground for a reinscription of a Western politics - yes, even a "radical" and "progressive" politics - in the roiling discursivity of the global today.   After Said's long and relatively "Pyrrhic" battle using Foucault's weapons of mass theoretical destruction against the empire of "Orientalism"/foundationalism in the Euro-American academy, the empire struck back with its own messianic politics of democracy, the "democracy to come", or Zizek's abstracted and contentless socialism.  Again, we hear the cry from deep within the rhizomic twinings of the trans-Atlantic ivy: Babylon has fallen, we are ready and equipped now to save them.  

The gist of post-colonialism, especially in light of the righteous critiques of Said himself, is that no "dialectical" god can save us.  We cannot revive Marx, because we cannot revive the dialectic.  The end of Bush is not the end of history.  We are all unrepentant prisoners of our "white mythologies."  Still many years after the "overcoming" and incineration of metaphysics, We have not recognized our own - in Homi Bhaba's language - our own "hybridity," our fragile confused subject-positions as Westerners who are not inextricably intermeshed with the ephemeral aggregrates of representation produced by global desiring machines and coded cross-cultural semiotic flows. 

We are no different than the once colonized.  We are "mimic men," as the post-colonialist word of discursive critique goes.  We are "inside" and "outside" simultaneously without a sense of priority, let alone hegemony, except that now we are mimicking them as much as they mimic us.  That is the underlying "deep politics" and higher consciousness of what we call "globalization."  Our god, yes, even the Hegelian god, is unable to save, because it is now thoroughly relativized and polytheized.  That is what it means to be "post" in the postmodern era.  All "change" that takes place within the Western subject-position is not change at all, unless it asks the question of the other and no longer privileges its own hybridity over other hybridities.    

The problem of theory in the age of globalization, as these sorts of theorists remind us, is where we speak from.  The colonial, or neo-colonial subject-position, while recognizing its own radical subjecthood after having constituted and facilitated a technology of self-formation for the oppressed and colonized autre, does not acknowledge its own fragmented voice, its own inability even amid its contempt for all ontologies of power to force a global dialectic where "liberation" can take place as a universal moment. It does not know yet that even its messianism of the emancipated has to be negotiated, comparativized, discharged into the stream of sign-passages.  It is too proud to say casually as it is said in all German conversation, particularly when the narrative of messianic self-delusion has run its course - mir ist egal.  

It was Gayatri Spivak, of course, who in the wake of Said's devastating deconstrual of the Orientalist position among the Western progressive intelligentsia unconvered the real logic of the post-colonial, and for that matter the post-Western, itself when she asked for the first time  a quarter century ago if the "subaltern" could speak.  The very notion of the sub-altern, the Derridean supplement of the liberated "self-consciousness" of the decolonized - e.g., the dalit - threatened to bring down the entire architecture of the politics of liberation.  It was the effacement that we term the subaltern at the margins of the textuality of the universal quest for human liberation that called into radical question the Western dialectic of the immanent messianic, the avenir that the dialectic itself was about to become a maintenant. 

At least for those fatally discouraged by the disaster of neo-con world messianism we seem to be at such a moment.  But for those "left behind" in the religious sense, who see the global unwinding and simultaneous transformation of the American economy and all its emerging forms of "faith-based" subject-positions, as an absolute exisential threat to American "values," and for those who have fatefully mistaken the collapse of the neo-liberal dream itself as the fearsome occasion for the new "rough beast" now slouching toward Washington, it is a similar moment.  The next twenty-four hours are anticipated as an apocalypse now.  But these apocalyptic broodings and nightmares, which we have never quite experienced before in a liberal democracy, are more the stuff of our own unrecognized and viral hybrditization of internal discontinuities. 

Is there really a "left" and a "right" clashing with almost equal ideological ground masses like impassioned armies of the night?  Or has American politics simply become a densification of a vast tapestry of demographic and ideological "subalterns" that are now clamoring to speak, but have been totalized amid the apocalyptic rhetoric of fear and loathing.  The Wall Street Journal columnist who comes out for Obama, or the former Reagan-cum-Hillary Democrat who votes Republican because of a perceived "sexism" on the first truly hybridized and globalized subject-candidate!  What's the matter with Kansas, since it votes values, not economic interest?  It's the double-consciousness and the double-loyalty, stupid!  

We are all Americans, but we are all globalized and "post-colonized" hybrid identities that have been absorbed and cast out for centuries by the dialectics of identification that shuttles infinitely between inclusion and exclusion.  But identity theory also includes its own fatal "revenge theory," as the indicative presence of the subaltern impresses on.  When the subaltern speaks, the game becomes confusing.  Who now is the "elite"?  Those who speak as champions of the excluded, the so-called "vanguard"?  Or are they the new colonialsts themselves ? Post-colonial theory is constantly identifying and singularizing both previously unacknowledged colonialists - perhaps, we might better say, colonialists who control the resources of language, the authentic elites - and undetected subalterns.

The subalterns are speaking on both sides in this election.  Whether we are talking about "African Americans who long resisted totally hitching their political identities to someone who might not be "black enough" (i.e., who embodied in a different way than they were used to the meaning of being an "African-American" wherein hybrid ethnicity trumped the essentialism of race) or to "hockey moms" who want to be spoken of "women" not in the way elite women are used to speaking of women, where being a subaltern is really about discerning the old forms of self-representation in terms of class (you know, "the middle class") over the once fashionable rhetorical identities of race and gender, we are witnessing the failure of even the most sophisticated totalization of all our political visions that would make Hegel not only turn over in his grave, but would exhume him and scatter his remains.

There is the famous Sufi story about the man who was once blind and finally could see, and who witnessed his first sunrise.  He turned to his guide and asked in horror, "is it the end of the world?"  "No", came back the reply, "it is the beginning  of new day."

New days are often born, however, in moments of clouds and thunder.  But tomorrow may not really be apocalypse now.  Welcome to the desert of the real.  Welcome to the post-Hegelian.  Welcome to the global.

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and senior editor for the JCRT.  He is the author of many books, including his most recent one GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).