Notes on Theology of Money – Chapter 1

Modern thought in its Cartesian heritage has distinguished two types of power namely physical power (mechanics) and human power (will).  Politics normally requires both conceptions.  Goodchild adds a third saying that the political is also characterized by an ‘energy’ that cannot be reduced to either which “guides and authorizes the action of will on will” (30).  This power must be accounted for (in political theology) otherwise it will become totalitarian under the veil of the ‘democratic subject’.

Modern thought has been humanistic in three related senses. 1) The human is constituted as independent from the divine 2) Th human subject is constituted through rational self-reflection and self-determination 3) The human subject demonstrates mastery over external nature.  The three major domains of mastery have been science, technology, and economics.  All three are proving to be presently unmasterable.  We are learning to face the reality that the human subject is profoundly limited in its sphere of influence and control.  But impotence “is one thing that must be excluded a priori from the representation of the sovereign subject” (34).

Because sovereign self-determination is only a political theory it must evoke “violence, severance, suspension, negation, or flight . . . to demonstrate the reality of power” (35).  For this to have any effect it must act in accordance with or overcome other human and non-human forms of power.  Goodchild offers an ‘alternative direction of thought’ away from the modern conception of mastery. In which “it is possible to enter the mediation of the concrete” (37).  This is an attempt to think imminently.  “It is here that a truly incarnate political theology is to be sought” (37).

The conversion of thought towards concrete reason, by means of a consideration of these political bodies, has a dual effect: it changes the content of reason, turning away from laws and first principles toward concrete problems and mediations, and it changes the nature of reason, since reason no longer stands over and above the concrete but must itself pass through concrete mediation (38).

Thought and inquiry must pass through bodies for it to gain substance.

As Jacques Lacan once said, “Man thinks with his object.” Contemporary philosophy, political theory, and theology can make no further progress without consideration of money (38).

Property, sovereignty, and credit become united in the body of money.  Money participates in and brings together the realms of the nonhuman, the human, and belief and desire.  In modernity, money is the political body par excellence. . . . Money effectively symbolizes the value of property, the sovereignty of freedom, and the power of desire (39).

These observations lead to a radical questioning of how these fundamental aspects of life relate and are conditioned by each other in relation to money.

In these relations power in the form of capital has been accepted as the primary mode of organization and production, even more primary than what is ‘natural’ (agriculture).  In light of a reality (money) that has become both creator and object of value the question is then asked,

What political bodies can still be created that will attribute a different hue or gravity to all particular things represented under their light?

Wedding homily 2.0

New opening line . . .

Dearly beloved our gathering creates an alternative coding that will not impact the substance of your present or future relationship.  However, the codes may be just strong enough to create a space that can offer itself as a non-destructive social narcotic.  And this, this is not a bad thing.

Yes, I just got back from my cousin’s wedding.  The chicken was juicy.  The bar was free.  And the speeches were actually quite funny.  And all kidding(?) aside I look forward to getting to know the new addition.

A post on an essay on abjection

Having comes across the use of the abject as a conceptual tool to think through political theology and pacifism I did a little digging and came across Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (link to full pdf); a text cited as forming some of the theoretical basis for the concept’s later development.  The opening paragraph is worthy of a slow read,

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts
of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable
boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the
one haunted by it literally beside himself.

And the concluding the opening section,

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing
insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence
and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture.

Kristeva in her work on abjection attempts to hover over a fundamental human experience; perhaps the fundamental human experience which is the inability to acknowledge or face our impotence in subsuming life within the bounds of our meaning.  To acknowledge that there is ‘something’ that I cannot recognize as a ‘thing’.

This is the literal shit of human life that I cannot rid myself of so I must always cleanse myself.

This is the desire for mother/father that is at once good and evil (or neither or both).

This is the inherent decay of death within food that is needed for life.

This is the eternal coding of a divine people who will not be assimilated.

These are seemingly universal realities which we cannot live with or live without.  These experiences raise fundamental questions of boundary.  Inside/Outside; Self/Other.  I came from my mother but I cannot return there.  Shit comes out one end but I would vomit trying to put it in another.  I desire to relate intimately but I cannot maintain the space between us I only vacillate between control and abandonment.  What cannot be assimilated as One or faced directly in opposition forms the abject.  A live body can be loved or fought but a dead body . . .

Kristeva traces the expression of abjection primarily in the Judeo-Christian stream orienting herself in Freud and then looking at taboo and ritual in Mosiac law and then the internalization of abjection in Christianity and with it the formation of ‘sin’.

Kristeva then spends several chapters exploring the content of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Celine is a writer of the abject as he continual hovers over the points of life where boundaries break down and where the abject is named and gagged over in fear and attraction (the Jew, the mother).  In his writing Celine attempts to push back the coding of the word to arrive at expressed emotion and with the allowance and facing and expressing of horror.  There is an attempt to explore expression that eludes or throws off the over-structuring and binding of the symbolic.  Kristeva offers this description,

With Celine we are elsewhere. As in apocalyptic or even
prophetic utterances, he speaks out on horror. But while the
former can be withstood because of a distance that allows for
judging, lamenting, condemning, Celine—who speaks from
within—has no threats to utter, no morality to defend. In the
name of what would he do it? So his laughter bursts out, facing abjection, and always originating at the same source, of which Freud had caught a glimpse: the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure, be it sex or death. And yet, if there is a gushing forth, it is neither jovial, nor trustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony. It is bare, anguished, and as fascinated as it is frightened.

And then further,

A laughing apocalypse is an apocalypse without god. Black
mysticism of transcendental collapse. The resulting scription
is perhaps the ultimate form of a secular attitude without morality,
without judgment, without hope. Neither Celine, who
is such a writer, nor the catastrophic exclamation that constitutes
his style, can find outside support to maintain themselves.
Their only sustenance lies in the beauty of a gesture that, here,
on the page, compels language to come nearest to the human
enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences
jouissance all at the same time. A language of abjection of which
the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple. Toppling
into what? Into nothing more than the effervescence of
passion and language we call style, where any ideology, thesis,
interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope become
drowned. A brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse of
a radical nihilism that can disappear only in “those bubbling
depths that cancel our existence” (R, 261). Music, rhythm,
rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

With Celine we reach a sort of climax in which our abjection has moved from external taboo and internal sin to the practice of literature as able to evoke the fascination, fear and power of horror.  In her conclusion Kristeva then asks, And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?  Here are excerpts of her response,

For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious,
moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals
and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are
abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their
repressed make up our “apocalypse,” and that is why we cannot
escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises.

Kristeva then turns to the (psycho)analyst in conclusion,

And yet, it would perhaps be possible for an analyst (if he could manage to stay in the only place that is his, the void, that is, the unthinkable
of metaphysics) to begin hearing, actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination
that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being but,
because it is heard as a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of the
feminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political
pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human
adventure. For, facing abjection, meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one. “Divine,” “human,”
or “for some other time,” the comedy or the enchantment can
be realized, on the whole, only by reckoning with the impossible
for later or never, but set and maintained right here.Fastened to meaning like Raymond Roussel’s parrot to its chain, the analyst, since he interprets, is probably among the rare contemporary witnesses to our dancing on a volcano. If he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine; provided that, in his or her capacity as a man or woman without qualities, he allow the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst out. Would he then be capable of X-raying horror without making capital out of its power? Of displaying the abject without confusing himself for it?

Probably not. Because of knowing it, however, with a
knowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter, an abject
knowledge, he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal)
that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking
place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which
is Judeo-Christian monotheism. In the meantime, let others
continue their long march toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,
wars that will necessarily be holy.Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing
aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that
they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I
rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration,
and hollowing—probably the only counterweight to abjection.
While everything else—its archeology and its exhaustion—is
only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses
in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and “that cancels our
existence” (Celine).

Upbuilding as unedifying

Well it was a fairly quick tear through Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.  Overall, as I mentioned in my last post, I was not impressed.  It was piece of simple and thoroughgoing introspection.  The basic thrust was that every individual is able to live joyously, but joy comes through suffering because suffering is the teacher of obedience and obedience of all things is necessary for joy.  I continue to grant Kierkegaard some margin on this stream of his thinking because it seems apparent that our contemporary subjective constitutions remain relatively flaccid.  However, where I see a necessary and critical rejection is in how this plays out in some of his examples.  Kierkegaard typically wants to drive a qualitative distinction between external influences and internal formation.  It is important for him that there is nothing external that can overcome an appropriate internal orientation (alone before God).

There are many assumptions inherent to this position.  It assumes a form of suffering based on recognition (i.e. people knew Kierkegaard was a genius, but perhaps also insane).  This assumes a rejection.  It does not explore the enmeshed relationship of abuse in which the very form of relating (and identity) can create a double-bind in the experience of the abused (an abusive spouse can express absolute need and revulsion in almost the same moments).  Kierkegaard concedes, in good Pauline literalist fashion, that if someone can choose their freedom then they should do so but then goes on and uses the actual example of a woman who bears “all the difficulties and caprices and insults of her husband” (I think you mean “shit” Kierkegaard . . . although I don’t know the original Danish) so that on the outside it looks like “a happy marriage”.  There is no redeeming the direction Kierkegaard takes this and in fact I would argue it goes against his very premise of individuality.  To “suffer meekly” in this instance is bind herself perversely to her husband and not “stand alone before God”.

Next is Works of Love.  I have read through it twice already.  I remember the second half holding the most engaging portion.  I am feeling the first signs of real lag in this reading schedule.  My pace is great but this last volume took a little wind out of my sails.  It did, however, raise an interesting conflict in my mind.  To what extent should I skim those works I am not interested in or agree with?  I know that is up to me and doesn’t really matter.  However, I have often given up reading something because it somehow attained lower worth.  Given that I have invested so much time in Kierkegaard (and have a thesis project with him on the horizon) it seemed important to practice the discipline of reading ‘unedifying discourses’ for the very purposes of understanding the logic that reacts against my thinking.

Kierkegaard’s privileged individual

I am about halfway through Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (UDiVS)and I have to say it is one of the least enjoyable reads so far.  Now perhaps the fault is my own and perhaps I should not even bother reading it.  Kierkegaard knew well that his ‘religious’ writings were not interesting and were not intended to be.  Most of them were written with the hope that perhaps an individual who was suffering might read them and through reading find some joy.  This is not my interest or posture in reading.  I am precisely looking for the interesting and innovative.

Now it is becoming clear to me that when Kierkegaard speaks of suffering he means very explicitly existential suffering.  The suffering people experience when they find themselves pulled and torn by paradoxes of life that result from humans being a synthesis of body and spirit.  There is a certain heaviness that hangs over humanity with some experiencing a greater darkness.  This suffering may be due to actual experiences of rejection or injustice but this sort of suffering comes to any who seek eternity in the midst of the temporal.  This is all sort of a paraphrase of how Kierkegaard talks about suffering.

I am also becoming more convinced that Kierkegaard probably really did suffer whether in some form of a clinical depression or just basic anxiety over life.  I read his ‘upbuilding’ discourses, like many of his other writings, as his own processing of belief and experience.  Faith speaks both of joy and suffering.  What could that mean?  This is the content of much of UDiVS.  Part of my increasing trouble with these discourses is the manner in which they are not interested and in fact reject any primacy in effecting change in external conditions.  So for instance,

Thus is one who is born a slave, in compliance with Apostle’s heartfelt admonition (for Christ did not come in order to abolish slavery, although this will follow and be a result of His coming), he is not concerned about it, and merely chooses freedom if it is offered: then he bears the heavy burden lightly.  How heavy this burden is, the unhappy slave knows best, and human sympathy understands it with him.  If he groans under the burden, as humanity groans with him, then he bears the burden heavily.  If he patiently submits to his fate, and patiently hopes for freedom, then he still does bear the burden lightly.  But the meek, who has had the courage really to believe in spiritual freedom, bear the heavy burden lightly: he neither relinquishes the hope of freedom, nor does he expect it (The Gospel of Suffering, 37).

What I can appreciate is that there may be a way of living in the midst of suffering that can actually alleviate the experience of suffering (that is, without changing conditions).  What I do not understand is why this can only be attained through the posture of resignation.  Isn’t the image of Christ one of resolute orientation (setting his face towards Jerusalem to encounter the crux of powers) towards the possibility of freedom?

So what I wonder about is the extent to which Kierkegaard’s message in his upbuilding discourses would offer comfort to those who already have a level of freedom and need to deal only with existential suffering or whether this message could actually help bring joy to someone in the midst of material and social bondage.  And if it did bring joy would this joy actually be an illusion?  For instance, would it teach the wife suffering domestic abuse to bear her burden with joy and patience?  Or would it create a strong base of individuality (that is a presence of being differentiated from the abuser) that could actually see the possibility of freedom that is before her and empower her to take it?  If the latter is not the case then I think Kierkegaard’s notion of the individual in these expressions needs further development.  I sense that the ‘individual’ is still a privileged individual who can be a ‘slave’ or ‘depressed’ (not to diminish these states) but who still carries a basic ‘ontological’ sense of their individuality as universal and valid.  Kierkegaard’s individual in these discourses still strikes me as basically a privileged individual.  And this would be in keeping with his biography as one who certainly suffered (internally and externally) but was always able to function with a certain autonomy and social power.

I don’t see this observation so much rejecting Kierkegaard’s overall aims but, as it is increasingly customary these days, it may be necessary to read Kierkegaard against himself and expose his ‘individual’ as not so much standing alone before God but as standing with a sort of minimum social power by which one is able to endure a level of psychological anguish.  The shift must be in making explicit the seizing of freedom that is available as the person enters into differentiated and empowered individuality.

And so with a great number of other readers I would have to say that Kierkegaard’s religious writings are certainly not among my favourite.

Notes on Theology of Money

This Fall I plan on leading a few adult education sessions on a theological understanding of contemporary economics.  This is far out of my field but something that is continually being impressed on me as crucial for the church to better understand and engage.  In preparation I am working through Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money.  I am about half-way through book and I am coming to realize that I should probably summarize or re-orient myself to what I have already read.

ToM is no simple theological gloss over the woes of the economy.  The heart of the work is a sustained (relentless?) conceptual framework for understanding money.  Here are a few points of orientation from the Introduction.

It is possible to consider money as mode of transcendent social/metaphysical orientation for life as other local cults and global religions have performed in the past.  One significant difference is that as an object money does not call attention to itself and therefore has alluded close scrutiny into the nature of its power.

Christianity has also largely evaded any scrutiny of the money’s power by internalizing the question of piety so as to remove it from the presence and effects of money.

The founding of the Bank of England can be viewed as a helpful image in the founding of modern capitalist economy.  As such it can be observed that from the very beginning this system functioned to create wealth in excess of itself . . . the creation of debt and interest.  With this model in place “production for the sake of profit rather than use became the dominant motivation for social activity and interaction” (11).

Money has continued to advance its place in society to the point of becoming the primary ritual activity that orients the social order in how it mediates the basic desires, values and beliefs of the people.

In order to study money it is important to acknowledge its dual nature.  It is both fixed and in motion.  And so, rejecting a basic Cartesian model of understanding Goodchild proposes 1) an ecology of money that traces its concrete relations 2) a politics of money the observes its effects over time 3) a theology of money that exposes its basic need for obligation and belief in order to function.

Hopefully more to come . . .

I blame Kierkegaard

My son is not yet two years old (well, in a couple of weeks) and as I write this I can hear him in the baby monitor repeating why, why, why as he falls asleep?  I blame Kierkegaard.

Is it just me or have the natural sciences unjustly appropriated the word ‘why’ as their mantra?  Isn’t theirs a question of how?

One of those little known passages

Having a recent post from Adam Kotsko in the back of mind a verse in Genesis 35 stood out as though in bold print.  The context is an account of Rachel’s giving birth to the last of the twelve sons of Israel.  Verse 18 reads,

As her soul was departing (for she died), she named him Ben-Oni [Son of my Sorrow]; but his father called him Benjamin [Son of the right hand/strength].

The voice of sorrow dies with the mother and symbol of power arises with the father.  Thank God this perversion is at least recorded.  Oh and a couple of verses later the first born Reuben sleeps with Bilhah mother of Dan and Napthtali.