Category: theologians theorists and the like

The Concept of Irony

The Concept of Irony is Kierkegaard’s master’s thesis.  It is an examination of the socratic method as irony.  Kierkegaard’s articulation and clarification of Socrates based on Plato and not Xenophon is already fruitful for a person like myself with little classical background in philosophy.

Kierkegaard describes irony as follows,

One may ask a question for the purpose of obtaining an answer containing the desired content, so that the more on questions, the deeper and more meaningful becomes the answer; or one may ask a question, not in the interest of obtaining an answer, but to suck out the apparent content with a question and leave only an emptiness remaining.  The first method naturally presupposes a content, the second emptiness; the first is speculative, the second ironic.

Socrates took aim at the knowing subject considering it a god-given task to dismantle what others may have called wisdom to show it to be, in fact, ignorance.

Kierkegaard’s Early Polemical Writings

Well I have started out with a pretty healthy pace on the Kierkegaard reading finishing the first volume last night.  The volume is of course relatively short and much less demanding than what I will be tackling.  The volume is primarily a composition journalistic debate, an extended review of his school mate Hans Christian Andersen and then a fragmented play exploring various philosophical modes.

Most of the content was not particularly engaging, though the critical review of Andersen definitely had its moments.  Kierkegaard basically charges Andersen of an inability to allow his life to be invested in the process of writing but rather “he has utilized [writing] in a purely external manner.  If we now add to this the temptation to produce instead of developing himself, to hide an inner emptiness under motley pictures, to let himself be absorbed in generation without any reproduction . . . then it will certainly not surprise us that, instead of carrying through his reflection, he on the contrary encloses himself in a very small space of it” (74).

Kierkegaard goes on charge Andersen of lacking a ‘life-view’ which he defines as follows,

A life-view is more than a quintessence or a sum of propositions maintained in its abstract neutrality; it is more than experience, which as such is always fragmentary.  It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience – or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the center as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true Christian conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, no principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” . . . A life-view if really providence in the novel; it is its deeper unity, which make the novel have the center of gravity in itself.  A life-view frees it from being arbitrary or purposeless, since the purpose if immanently present everywhere in the work of art. (76, 81)

I just finished SK’s introduction to The Concept of Irony it looks to be both educational philosophically and engaging in terms of SK’s intellectual development.

Early Polemical Writings – The Opponent

The Kierkegaard Project has started off slow.  I feel like I am an amateur marathon runner tempted to sprint ahead but forcing myself to find a manageable pace.  I am reading the writings of a young Kierkegaard engaged in local journalistic debates that I do not have the inclination to learn more about at the moment.  One quote, however, seemed appropriate to throw up into the blogosphere.  The context could be characterized as a pre-blog comment thread;

When in a dispute the point is reached where the opponent says: I cannot understand you, although I have the best intentions – then that ends the dispute.  And although we shall willingly leave outside the whole dispute the question of whether or not his intentions are the best, because until the opposite can be proved we remain ever convinced of this, one must always respect such a move by the opponent.  But when instead he starts to attack the character of the person he is speaking to, accuses him of being a willful sophist etc., then it can at the most provoke a smile on the lips of the opponent, because the whole thing is nothing other than comic despair.

– Early Polemical Writings, 22.

2011 – A Year of Living Existentially

Seeing some prospective plans for 2011 and more impressively seeing some accomplished plans from 2010 (I’ll let you identify the theme) I thought I would set out my own grand vision for 2011 . . . a year of living existentially.  Kierkegaard in a year.  I will be following the trajectory of Princeton’s edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.  I do not have all volumes on hand so it is difficult to set a ‘pace’ but hell I thought I would throw this up in a fit of passion and triumph victorious by 2012 or let me good blogging name be sullied in the process.  Here is the list;

May God have mercy on my soul.

Born Not of a Husband’s Will

This Sunday I will be preaching John 1:1-18 . . . well were could I possibly go with that?  I took the opportunity to begin with the only joke I can remember which which is Zizek’s Lacanian joke about the man who believed he was a grain.

A man had been seeing a psychiatrist for some time.  The problem it seems was that he kept believing he was a grain of seed.  He and the psychiatrist worked on this issue for some time.  They made slow progress until one day both he and the psychiatrist were sure that the problem solved.  The man no longer believed he was a grain of seed.  The two shook hands and parted encouraged by what was possible.  The man left the office onto the street and a few seconds later returned in fear and panic.  Obviously concerned the psychiatrist asked what was wrong.  The man said that there was a chicken standing right outside the office door.  The psychiatrist responded, “Remember you are not a grain of seed.”  The man replied, “I know that, but how I can be sure the chicken does?”

From here I moved to what seemed like the obvious parallel.

Continue reading “Born Not of a Husband’s Will” →

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead


Digging Into the End

I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space.  I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space.  It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim.  Then light became absent.  Things slowed down but my mind continued.  Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled.  This is the end, there is no further.  But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?

This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces.  It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence.  I no longer see this as the case.  I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary.  In any  event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately.  Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS).  Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire.  As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.

A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does.  It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought.  The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’.  Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]

This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion.  I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence.  Who is policing the boundaries?  Who is claiming access or insight into the other side?  Who has dug through the end?  Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends.  Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret.  But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

. . .

I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.

This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation.  This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust.  I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world.  What else is kenosis?  As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith.  And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.

Romans 13 – An Agambenian Reading

Romans 13 has long been a thorn in my Anabaptist side.  Yoder of course went a long way in clarifying the distinction between being subject to those in authority and actually obeying those in authority.  That reading however still left me with many unanswered questions as to what Paul is calling the church towards.  In preparation for the Romans readings of this season of Advent I reread Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains.  In this reading the notion of messianic time functioning as “the time of bringing time to an end” became more clear and relevant as I was reading through Romans alongside his work.  I interpret the structure of the world’s authority as functioning as a sort of limit to the mode in which humanity lives apart from the Spirit.  As such the kingdom of the world is and will be coming to an end.  This becomes significant for reading Romans 13.  What struck me was the simple Greek structure of verse 7
ἀπόδοτε πᾶσιν τὰς ὀφειλάς,
τῷ τὸν φόρον τὸν φόρον,
τῷ τὸ τέλος τὸ τέλος,
τῷ τὸν φόβον τὸν φόβον,
τῷ τὴν τιμὴν τὴν τιμήν.
Pay back every debt
for tax, tax
for revenue, revenue
for fear, fear
for respect, respect
Then Paul adds significantly in verse 8,
Μηδενὶ μηδὲν ὀφείλετε
Be in indebted to no one for anything (I can’t comment on the double-negative in Greek here; I suspect it is common)
The process of relating to earthly authorities is that of closing down their economy, of divesting yourself of its structure (which is different than escaping it).  The work then is not of revolt (necessarily) which is why this passage can be confused for quietism but rather that of rendering it inoperative an important Pauline term that Agamben stresses.  I read this in light of Kierkegaard’s commentary on Paul’s And having overcome all, to stand.  Much of our effort exists directly in relationship to opposition.  Opposition in many cases is absolutely necessary for the existence of our work.  I need the machine to rage against it.  This is a reductionist characterization to be sure but I can’t help think of how many movements will simply fall down when the powers are removed from their pushing.  In any even I take Paul to be doing something different than direct revolt.  This does not necessarily clarify what we should then do with this reading but it demands that we not acquiesce to earthly authority but that we are continually in the active process of liberating ourselves and others from indebtedness.
To the extent that you are invested in this world whether tax, debt, fear or honour pay it back in kind so that all that remains in practice is the opening of love and not the foreclosure of debt.  The work of this ‘flesh’ will continually be present in a humanly inescapable manner (who will rescue me from this body of death).  We become though tools of light which cut through and create a division within the divisions of this world that constantly undermine and deactivate them.  This is all exegetical rhetoric at this point.  I have no idea what sort of tool I will function as what it demands though is that no position within world renders spiritual impossible.  No system is dominant that it can, by its force, reclaim the new creation of the Messiah.  This problematizes the typical leftist project as I would see it which continually stresses system as that which binds and liberates (though it does that at a certain level).  I read this text and larger Pauline theology (in light of Agamben) as one which always supposes the freedom of the individual so that she might work within the place of her calling (and in communion with the saints) dividing the divisions and use this time for bringing time to an end.

Debt, time, [and the new] wealth

Here is an extended quote from Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work,

The postmodern domination of capitalism is founded on the refrain of wealth, understood as cumulative possession.  A specific idea of wealth took control of the collective mind which values accumulation and the consent of the postponing of pleasurable enjoyment.  But this idea of wealth (specific to the sad science of economics) transforms life into lack, need and dependence.  To this idea of wealth we need to oppose another idea: wealth as time – time to enjoy, to travel, learn and make love.

Economic submission, producing need and lack, makes our time dependent, transforming our life into a meaningless run towards nothing.  Indebtedness is the basis of this refrain.

In 2006, the book Generation Debt (subtitled: Why now is a terrible time to be young) was published in the United States.  The author, Anya Kamenetz considers a question that finally came to the forefront of our collective attention in 2007, but has been fundamental to capitalism for a long time: debt.

Anya Kamenttz’s analysis refers especially to young people taking out loans in order to study.  For them, debt functions like a symbolic chain whose effects are more powerful than the real metal chains formerly used in slavery.

This new model of subjugation goes through a cycle of capture, illusion, psychological submission, financial trap and finally pure and simple obligation to work.

. . .

Our young fellow signs the loan, goes to university and graduates: after that, his/her life belongs to the bank.  S/he will have to start work immediately after graduation, in order to pay back a never ending amount of money. . . . S/he will have to accept any condition of work, any exploitation, any humiliation, in order to pay the loan which follows her wherever s/he goes.

Debt is the creation of of obsessive refrains that are imposed on the collective mind.  Refrains impose psychological misery thanks to the ghost of wealth, destroying time in order to transform it into economic value.  The aesthetic therapy we need – an aesthetic therapy that will be the politics of the time to come – consists in the creation of dissipating refrains capable of giving light to another modality of wealth, understood as time for pleasure and enjoyment.

The crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has opened a new scene: the very idea of social relation as ‘debt’ is now crumbling apart.

The anti-capitalist movement of the future won’t be a movement of the poor, but of the wealthy.  The real wealthy of the future will be those who will succeed in creating forms of autonomous consumption, mental models of need reduction, habitat models for the sharing of indispensable resources.  This requires the creation of dissipative wealth refrains, or of frugal and ascetic wealth.

in the virtualized model of semiocapitalism, debt worked as a general frame of investment, but it also became a cage for desire, transforming desire into lack, need and dependency that is carried for life.

Finding a way out of such a dependency is a political task whose realization is not a task for politicians.  It’s a task for art, modulating and orienting desire, and mixing libidinal flows.  It is also a task for therapy, understood as a new focalization of attention, and a shifting of the investments of desiring energy.