I have been wanting to record a few points as I have been reading through Jacob Taubes’s From Cult to Culture.  The middle section of this collection of essays focuses on theology.  Part of what I have enjoyed about Taubes is his writing style.  There is always a hint of polemic but not overwrought, rather, the posture comes through in a basic clarity and force.  I have also really appreciated the introduction to a number of thinkers that I had either never heard of (Joachim of Fiore) or did not realize their significance (Franz Overbeck).

In any event I wanted at least to outline a few quotes from his article on Tillich and theology.  In this and other articles Taubes draws attention to the notion that “theology signals a crisis in religion” (here he is quoting Plato).  Theology emerges when “a mythical configuration breaks down and its symbols that are congealed in a canon come into conflict with a new stage of human consciousness” (193).

From the very beginning the church was thrown into a difficult situation in which extreme eschatological symbols were brought into the stark realities of history.  “The history of the development of Christian theology is a tragic history because there is no ‘solution’ to the conflict between eschatological symbols and the brute fact of a continuing history” (197).  Theology continued to employ a basic allegorical approach to canonical texts but the tension was heightened to a sort of impasse with the emergence of historical criticism.  This process working within the texts of the church came to view Christianity as “a ‘religion of Jesus,’ discarding all Christological doctrines as dead weight” (197).

Taubes introduces Paul Tillich’s theology as exemplifying the theological impasse of being a discourse for and within the church but possess tendencies to overcome or go beyond the confines of the church.  Taubes sees this as  a dialectical process moving between a ‘theology of the logos’ and a ‘doctrine of the church’.  And in its nature “the dialectical method is not a coach that can be stopped at will” (202).  In this way theology cannot be systematic “because the incarnation of the Christ cannot be treated as a systematic axiom” (203).  It is artificial and disingenous to put the allegorical genie back in the bottle.  We need to remain faithful to the impasse.

Taubes is trying to put a fine point on the paradoxes and contradictions at work within the projects of modern theology.  Again, what is at stake is the nature of revelation as a given authority.  While this is a tension that is typically recognized as being between theology and modernity Taubes is clear that this is between religion and theology.  And his response to remains suggestive,

Perhaps the time has come when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and classical authorities and stand in the world without authority.  Without authority, however, theology can only teach by an indirect method.  Theology is indeed in a strange position because it has to prove its purity by immersing itself in all the layers of human existence and cannot claim for itself a special realm.  In losing itself in the forms of the world, theology would not betray its destiny. . . . Theology must remain incognito for the sanctification of the world.  Theology should not strive for the vainglory to present a sacred science ‘separated’ from the sciences by special doctrines or dogmas, but rather it should serve in ‘lowliness of mind’ the secular knowledge and life. Would theology miss its point if instead of insisting on a separating circle, it would make itself of no special reputation and take upon itself the form of incognito? In such a fashion, theology would become more likely to present  the relation between the divine and the human in our time. (205)

I take some comfort in this considering my own ‘creative process’ in trying to write sermons.

[At the library t]he way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into.  This is because sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended length of time is, as a practical matter, impossible.  If you said, “I spent the whole night in the library, working on some sociology paper,” you really meant that you’d spent between two and three hours working on it and the rest of the time fidgeting and sharpening and organizing pencils and doing skin-checks in the men’s room mirror and reading about, say, Durkeim’s theories of suicide.

– David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, 291

During my time in seminary I was fascinated with the implications and practices of translation; the word ‘translator’ itself is caught up with the term ‘traitor’.  There is no faithful translation; no 1-to-1 equivalence.  This, also, of course does not mean there are not better and worse translations.  And how we judge these translations will depend on prior motivations and orientations.  But that there is no faithful translation should seem practically self-evident but of course theologies have a way of skewing the picture.  My seminary still held a confession of faith maintaining an inspiration of scripture in their original form.  Again, that whole articulation should be self-evidently problematic, but I digress (I should also note the institutions confession was more a function of the governing board than the faculty).

I remember having a conversation about translation with one of my professors.  He proposed the image of a person fluently bilingual creating a poem and speaking it in both languages.  For him, this would represent a faithful translation.  For some reason this memory came to mind as representing precisely the issue with (largely) evangelical or more conservative orientations to the world that hold to the autonomy or elevation of the individual to the neglect of social forces.  There was no conceding that the languages being spoken represented distinct discourses that held ideological forms and expressions that influenced the meaning of everything.  In this professor’s mind the intention of the author was a trump that could overcome this.  There was an inability to see how his own theological discourse was keeping him from understanding the realities and forces at work beyond him.

I visited an elderly woman in the hospital the other day.  She was quite talkative and we chatted for some time.  She was in her mid-eighties and aware of her early stages of dementia.  The conversation was entirely intelligible and she was very quick with a good sense of humour.  But for a brief moment in the midst of that conversation she transitioned and I cannot remember exactly how it started but I will paraphrase from what I remember,

I have buried my parents once already.  But I see them at distance.  I can recognize them but they never come to me.  Mother, she never danced but now she dances.  Father, I don’t know, I think he is looking for his second wife.  . . . My husband, before he passed, told me that better times were coming.  I’m still waiting [looks at me and smiles].

When I wrote my post reflecting on this past year in reading I did so just sort of thinking of which books came to mind.  Surprisingly my time reading a few of Freud’s works completely escaped my memory.  Well isn’t that interesting.  It is a tricky thing accepting Freud.  On the one hand his interpretative edifice is so coloured by his key ideas such as our preoccupation with sex that at times it is hard not laugh.  This is particularly the case in his interpretation of dreams where he can rattle off long lists of the most generic images that clearly contain a direct sexual reference.  Smoking a cigar were you, um-hmm.  But how can you argue with his interpretation?  I mean it is happening in the unconscious after all!  This is of course too simplistic but it leads to the second and, what I what I find to be, much more constructive element of accepting some of his basic premises.  In psychoanalysis everything is fair game for interpretation.  You actually cannot hide.  There is no real push to come clean or be honest with yourself because the truth is that you are already divided.  You are already actively policing the manner in which the unconscious gains access and expression in the conscious life.  But in this way you are, not matter what you are doing, actually revealing the truth, because that slippage, that policing is the truth of identity.

In as much as there is still some mourning over the loss of some stable notion of the self, of our ability to know who we really are, this Freudian posture can be quite liberating.  While the unconscious is often imaged as the huge mass of the iceberg that lurks beneath the surface of the water, the reality in adopting this position is to remove a fixation on that inaccessible mass and actually pay more attention to what is on the surface.  For it is precisely on the surface that we are able to discern patterns and movements and make interpretations.  It is here and not in some constructed subconscious that true meaning lies.  This of course also means that we do not hold to literal interpretation of the surface, as though that could in any way be self-evident (after all, as interpreters we also have an active schism in our minds!).

The enduring force of Freud’s work was in fact the power of his interpretation, regardless of how it may now look dated or blatantly prejudiced.  Nothing was out of bounds.  Because the object of interpretation was the human mind then any human action was fair, it all had to be accounted for in some form.  I am still digesting aspects of this framework and look forward to reading some of the psychoanalytic trajectories that came out of this powerful expression.  But apparently my conscious thought did not want me to remember such things.

For the last couple of years the new year has parked a shift in my reading patterns.  Two years ago, on a whim, I decided to try and read through Kierkegaard’s published works and as that proved successful I set another trajectory.  Last year’s was not quite as well defined though I was intent on finishing a number of ‘check-list’ books that I felt just had to be read at some point.

The year began with a tour through phenomenology reading Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.  This was followed by Heidegger’s Being and Time concluded by Jean Luc Marion’s Reduction and Givenness.  To be honest I was much more interested in phenomenology before reading these works.  A large part of that I am sure was my inability to follow major swaths of the argument.  The phenomenological turn, for me, stands out now as philosophy’s last great attempt as a re-start of sorts.  How do we observe and articulate the internal relations of the world as we perceive and process them?  I will likely come back to Heidegger at some point (and may take my hand at Merleu-Ponty) but I think its now time to give this school a rest.

Another major item on my list was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.  While, again, I was greatly handicapped in following aspects of the text it was good to spend sustained time and energy trying to feel out how Hegel was trying to account for the whole and the movements, changes, and limitations within the whole.  It is a bit tiring to read about how what is, is the best thing that has been in terms of historical development.  Perhaps Hegel gets misread in his evolutionary account of history but it is also not that hard to understand why it does.  He is often both convincing and frightening.

Thanks to the birth of the Critical Conversation reading group I was able to read a wider range of contemporary theorists (as we stuck to article length pieces).  The stand out for me was Philip Goodchild’s work on the intellectual contribution to liberation.  Crucial to his piece was the difference between attention and imagination.  Attention is the discipline of intellect to be affected by the world around whereas imagination projects truth onto the world.

While my productivity at this blog has not always been great I have been able to get a few pieces published elsewhere this year.  For those interested I have added an ‘Elsewhere‘ link on the page links above.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of reading this past year was getting into contemporary fiction.  I attribute this 100% to getting an e-reader about a year ago.  I have rarely been interested in buying contemporary fiction and I have an aversion to reading books from the library.  I also have to admit a sort of prejudice that simply does not think there is much good fiction out there now.  Whenever I would try and read something current I also always felt that the writing style relied too heavily on just being clever.  Fortunately my first serious re-entry into contemporary fiction was reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (and just think of the benefits of the e-reader for this one!).  I probably set the initial bar too high but it gave me hope so I moved on Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles which was perhaps a little more risque than I am used to but blended philosophical reflection and narrative integrity well.  After coming to appreciate Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I was looking forward to his much hyped classic Blood Meridan and, well, as the saying goes you can’t always believe the hype.

I am currently finishing Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  This is another massive book that is excellent to have on an e-reader.  I have mixed feelings about this book.  It is engaging.  Its plot is compelling.  It has moments of striking insight.  However, this book is ultimately putting me off of fiction again.  It is reminding me that while there is nothing wrong in simply being entertaining and well plotted there is just something more that I am typically looking for when I read.  1Q84 has dragged out too long without the payoff.  Its ‘meta-discourse’ is also a reflection on the power of narrative itself to shape and form the world.  While, again, there are moments of insight in this account I am just left feeling like I don’t care.

So what is on tap for 2013?

I missed spending more time immersed in the writings of a single author.  I did read two of Nietzsche’s major works last year that stands out as a highlight.  I don’t think I am prepared to devote an entire year to one author but I would like focus on a few writers.

I got a taste for Jacob Taubes after reading The Political Theology of Paul this past year.  I had not found myself engaging in the whole ‘apocalyptic turn’ in many recent theologies but Taubes was apocalyptic without being ‘other-worldly’.  Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze (with and without Guattari) are also authors I have neglected to give sustained attention.  I also picked up James Pritchard’s classic collection of Ancient Near Eastern texts and have really enjoyed reading the epics and legal texts of that time period.  I am hoping to develop a crude trajectory of historical texts that run alongside the development of the Bible.  So this would move through the Ancient Near East, OT pseudepigrapha, Apocryhpha, Philo, Josephus, and then on into patristics and gnostic texts (this I am hoping will become a long term discipline).

In the area of fiction I will hopefully spend more time with Kafka and as for contemporary fiction Wallace’s The Pale King is the only one on the radar.

Well that is more than enough for year, I am guessing.  What are your retrospects and prospects?