Category: world

Forced corruption

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt.

This line is a quote from Slavoj Zizek’s speech at Occupy Wall Street.  I will not try and wade into the larger conversation about this movement (see here for frequent updates).  I want simply to focus on this line.  For me this line is a stumbling block; and I believe stumbling block is precisely the correct term.  I continue to believe in autonomous morality.  I continue to believe that it is possible for each individual to make a morally valid decision in real life circumstances.  I believe this despite the fact that I know it is not true.  And so I come to a stumbling block, an offense.

I sat with this line as I visited a man from my neighbourhood.  Our church is not exactly a hot spot for those seeking material support though we get our share of traffic.  The process is almost always the same.  There is prefacing story which sets the person both in morally acceptable or pitiable conditions.  This often includes acknowledging some religious conviction, some desire to work, and some immediate pressing need.  I will then wait for the second half of the conversation in which the person will move inevitably towards his (almost exclusively a male) best shot at getting something out of the exchange.

And there I sit, Solomon on his throne, judging how best to suggest sawing his child in half to reveal true motivations.  I stand as the face and gate-keeper of what should be the symbol of consuming charity.  Now to be sure charity is not paternalism but why does paternalism exist in the context of giving charitably?  Still one must learn to be responsible, correct?  To the extent that responsiblity lies in the realm of economics I will continue to be corrupt in my engagement with those in need.  To the extent that responsbility is integrated into a relational fabric there may be a chance to level out life experiences.  Current capitalist economics demands a responsibility based on severed points of accountability.  It demands I take care of my house.  And this is where existentialism remains important in conversations about social systems.  One must ultimately be converted into a larger house; a house that still has rooms and boundaries but a house that also has a larger and expanding commons.  The church in North America, by and large, cannot offer a commons to those who seek it.  And until then I may be forced to remain corrupt.

Christian Discourses, Helplessness Blues, and the mechanics of liturgy

[This started as a simple update on my Kierkegaard reading then turned into something I wanted to edit and develop but I doubt that will happen any time soon so I thought I would throw it up in its disjointedness.]

As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses was firmly okay.  It was gently pastoral in tone while attempting to stir and provoke in content.  The second half entitled “Thoughts that wound from behind” promised to be more engaging.  The preface of the second half read,

The essentially Christian needs no defense, is not served by any defense – it is the attacker, to defend it is of all perversions the most indefensible, the most inverted, and the most dangerous – it is  unconsciously cunning treason.  Christianity is the attacker – in Christendom, of course, it attacks from behind. (162)

The final line is of course of utmost importance for what follows because Kierkegaard’s attack is against the notion that Christendom can implicitly produce Christians.  Kierkegaard begins by noting the role of circumstance in the power of a message how “the sickbed and the nighttime hour preach more powerfully than all the orators [because they] know this secret of speaking to you in such a way that you come to perceive that it is you who is being addressed, you in particular (164).  Kierkegaard relates this to his understanding of the ‘Lord’s house’ and how it is to be a place more terrifying than terror (for awakening that is) though pastors take it to be a place to preach for tranquilization.  The Lord’s house is by definition the space that a human encounters the truth, that is, encounters God.  This is a horror becuase it is an encounter with sin.

Here in God’s house there is essentially discourse about a horror that has never occurred either before or after, in comparison with which the most horrible thing that can happen to the most unfortunate of all people is a triviality: the horror that the human race crucified God. (172)

This discourse of terror is the first discourse and it is necessary.  The Christian is to use this discourse to win people – “but woe to you if you win them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (175).  So use this discourse to terrify people but “woe to you if you do not use it essentially to win them for the truth” (175).

While these discourses began with a pointed and promising account of attack or ‘awakening’ they settled into what (from a contemporary perspective) is a now familiar account of the need to ‘break from the herd’ in how you understand your own subjectivity and how it is formed.  I do not doubt the ongoing validity of this message it is only that the ‘herd mentality’ is now precisely in being unique and original.

How then does one break from the demand of uniqueness and become formed as an individual?

There is the already well commented on lines from Fleet Foxes recent single Helplessness Blues in which they harmonize on being some cog in a greater machine.

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

In that instance the strength of individuality is in its submission to something  beyond the scope of a single subjectivity.  I think this is a fair response.  The problem of course is that there is no such static machine in which humans function as the cogs and pulleys.  The response in HB is a sort of almost naive localism.

If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

I say almost because of the final lines of the piece.

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen

They recognize that this too, this honest labour, is the production of the entertainment industry.  It is the production of flat subjectivity that will not truly intervene in the existing order.  For Kierkegaard subjectivity is based around the primary human dialectic of being a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal.

It is the final section of Christian Discourses that offers some help in understanding how the Christian can engage in the practices of faith while attending to the internal dialectic of subjectivity.  This final section is a collection of discourses to be read at Friday Communion services.  As such they offer a rare glimpse into Kierkegaard’s direct and public communication on church liturgy.  There is no strength in the basic repetition of Communion as an act that builds an alternate imagination.  This would be to function as a cog some great machinery.  Rather one does indeed approach the Communion table and share in the elements but when you leave it is as if the Communion table followed you (273).  It is only possible to speak of real presence because there is continuity with the table and with Christ.  “Where he is, there is the Communion table” (273).  The Communion table becomes present not necessarily at the religious site but at the site of reconciliation that is called for prior to sacrifice (Matt 5:23-24).  “The task is to remain at the Communion table when you leave the Communion table” (274).  A sermon should ‘bear witness to him. . . . At the Communion table, however, it is his voice you are to hear” (271).  The point here is simple.  There must be continuity and congruence.  And the perhaps the solution for the church is just as simple, that is, to call individuals to both leave and remain at the Table.

Notes from the Exodus

I would say the most concerted and continuous effort that I made in formal studies was in the area of biblical Hebrew. This is a sort of sad statement given the level of proficiency I have maintained. Recently though I have taken to preach on the OT passages of the Lectionary and, being summer, I find myself with a bit more time to work in the ‘original text’. This Sunday will be Exodus 1:1-2:10. I have greatly appreciated the small (and significant) nuances that have emerged from even a basic walk through the Hebrew.

Many of the observations can be made from the English as well.  The most clear is the precedent of ‘creation’ as a guiding motif in the Moses narrative.  We find Joseph and his brothers dead but the Israelites remained “fruitful and prolific” a common refrain in the creation story.

In light of this expanding foreign race Pharaoh decides to deal ‘shrewdly’ with them so they do not join the enemy.  The word join is a play on the name Joseph (to be added to) a figure of blessing for Egypt who has now been forgotten and his descendents are deemed a threat.

Pharaoh sets slave-drivers over the Israelites in work of ‘mortar and brick’ which is an allusion to the building of the Tower of Babel.

In response to Pharaoh’s increasing pressure on the people (and their increasing expansion) there is an order to kill the male children in child-birth.  Here we find the famous mid-wive’s of civil disobedience who do not follow the law.  What I find interesting is that their names, Shiphrah and Puah, indicate a type of ‘signalling’ of what is coming.  Shiphrah is a feminine form related to the Shophar which is a trumpet that is often used to refer to the coming of the presence of God (Ex 19:16).  Puah, as near as I can figure, is a variation on an onomatopoetic verb used to describe the sounds of a woman in labour, again ushering in the presence of something new.  The women here stand as the vanguard in the revolt creating space for the liberation of their people.

Verse 12 of chapter one contains two interesting expressions.  The NRSV reads,

the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

‘Spread’ is a suitable translation but does not have the visceral connotations as the Hebrew does in which there seems to be some implied ‘breach’ of a clear boundary.  When used in the relation to a holy space the word is often translated ‘break’ as in the Lord will ‘break out’ upon you.  ‘Dread’ is also a curious translation.  The word is not used often in the Hebrew Bible.  The term is used in several instances to refer to a sort of naseous sickness over a given situation.  It is the way the people feel after having eaten manna for too long.  It is the way a person can literally feel sick with fear.  Given some of the recent readings on abjection I picture this verse to be saying that the Egyptians tried to crush the Hebrews like a bug and ended up splattering guts all over them.

Thinking about the abject as neither subject (self) nor object (enemy)  also led me to consider another image that was not really illuminated by the Hebrew but important nonetheless.  Verse ten of chapter one reads,

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.

In this construct the Israelite is neither self nor object.  They form a type of appendage to the Egyptian kingdom.  The abject is a part of what sustains the subject so long as it does not ultimately become the object (or worse become its own subject!).  So long as it does not ‘break out’ of the boundary set by the subject (read: colonialism).

And of course one of the more well known observations is how the ‘vessel’ that Moses is set adrift on is the same word for Ark used in the Flood account.

So anyway, we’ll see if this takes me anywhere closer to a coherent sermon.

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?

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).

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 . . .

Kierkegaard on the present age

It has been wonderful to cover a couple of Kierkegaard’s shorter volumes.  Given my last post on my readings I was surprised at how social this volume was.  This volume is actually an extended review of a contemporary piece of fiction entitled Two Ages.  The two ages are the age of (the French) revolution and the present age.  While the opening sections do deal directly with the content of the novel it is the longer third section that gets the most attention as it is Kierkegaard’s own appropriation of the novel for his context.

Continue reading “Kierkegaard on the present age” →

The super and sub human

So if you are interested in pondering the absurd then have a look at what a local 54 year old grandfather just accomplished.  Just a few highlights;

1. Cycled 6,055 km in 13 days, nine hours and change.  This stands as the fastest coast-to-coast cycling across Canada.

2. Breaking this record included an injury part way through (which required a 15 hr break!).

3. His pace demanded cycling a minimum of 20 hours a day.

These facts do not compute in my brain.  Through the medium of long distance cycling Arvid has raised over 1.5 million dollars.  His charity of choice is an organization that works with street kids in Kenya.  So why I am about to transition to some critical comments related to this story?  First a couple of qualifications.  No criticism is intended towards Arvid.  The fact that he found an expression that allows him to generate this type of support for what I will assume is a great cause can only be commended.  I also assume that other perspectives than the following could be taken (such the need of extreme behaviour to draw attention to extreme situations),  I want, however, to take a step back and ask one question and make one observation.

Why can herculean feats raise this type of money?  Is there not something bizzare or even perverse about the need for someone to perform at super-human levels to draw funds for those living in sub-human conditions?  I will go out on an unsubstantiated limb and venture a guess in saying that the vast majority of Arvid’s support comes from the corporate sector in which donors can only ‘win’ from their association with Arvid.  Arvid becomes the super-hero logo on their chest which invigorates the public imagination.  While Arvid remains out of the average person’s reach the corporation gives the public access to this imagination by acquiring their brand while also associating the average person with helping ‘the poor’ (this is the power of the corporation not Arvid) on the other side of the world.  This leads to my observation;

The owners of Palliser Furniture in Winnipeg created some ‘incentive’ for Arvid saying that if he broke the record they would present him with a check for $50,000 at the finish line.  Now I will also venture a guess in saying that Palliser would have donated the money regardless.  However, the scenario again focuses on some implicit value in this herculean accomplishment.  The money is not worth donating directly to street kids in Kenya, that is, bringing the conditions of a group of people’s life up to a minimally acceptable level.  Or to put it another way, the money is not worth donating to someone who simply demonstrates the need and effectiveness of the situation and organization represented.  Instead the money is worth wagering on the possibility of achieving the never before achieved.  When given the choice between bringing others up to a minimum level on the one hand or extending our reach beyond the maximum the choice is clear (though we are supposed to believe that the two work together).

To again be clear.  I have nothing but respect for Arvid’s accomplishments.  To have inspiring figures in various fields and expressions is part of the beauty of human nature.  What I am drawing attention to is the structure around extreme expressions like Arvid’s.  The amount of global economic resources that could be available from the world’s most wealthy is staggering.  And yet it is the folks without such resources that are required to enter the super-human before investors find enough ‘value’ to throw their tax-deductible donations at so they can still receive a return on investment.

The corsair affair and yet another rejection of politics

Volume 13, The Corsair Affair, is a collection of texts (many of which not written by Kierkegaard) that helps readers to understand what came to be known by this volume title.  The Corsair was a satirical journal that took aim at any culturally relevant figure in Denmark.  While the journal was notable and feared for its lampoons Kierkegaard (or Victor Emerita) was first mentioned in praise for work Either/Or.  Kierkegaard (Emerita) responded publicly by asking how he could be so insulted as to be praised in The Corsair.  While there are many layers involved in understanding why this exchange escalated the way it did one aspect was the growing awareness of Kierkegaard as the author of his pseudonymous works.  Once Kierkegaard’s indirect method became engaged directly he was skewered mercilessly for his own personal appearance, affect and mannerisms.  It is said that the phrases ‘Soren’ or ‘Either/Or’ became pejorative terms hurled at him in the streets.  He was also consistently compared to a local known as ‘Crazy Nathanson’.

What interests me is the extent to which this escalation reflects Kierkegaard’s vehement guard against directness.  To what extent was The Corsair taunting him to see if he would show his cards and lose composure.  Kierkegaard it seems never lost his composure though he appears to have been hurt considerably in the process.  I admit that my reading of this volume was a little more superficial as I found the historical understanding more interesting than the texts themselves.  I did however pause over an extended comment by Kierkegaard rejecting any notion that he is interested in changing externals (politics).  It seems as though from the very beginning people were interested in leveraging a political theory out of him.  I thought it worth offering his comments almost in full.

In Ursin’s Arithmetic, which was used in my school days, a reward was offered to anyone who could find a miscalculation in the book.  I also promise a reward to anyone who can point out in these numerous books a single proposal for external change, or the slightest suggestion of such a proposal, or even anything that in the remotest way even for the most nearsighted person at the greatest distance could resemble an intimation of such a proposal or of a belief that the problem is lodged in externalities, that external change is what is needed, that external change is what will help us.

. . .

There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than about all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion that can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church reformation, a reverse reformation that in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something old and better, although it is still supposed to be an honest-to-goodness reformation, which is then celebrated by illuminating the entire city.

Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening.  If at a given time the forms under which one has to live are not the most perfect, if they can be improved, in God’s name do so.  But essentially Christianity is inwardness.  Just as man`s advantage over animals is to be able to live in any climate, so also Christianity’s perfection, simply because it is inwardness, is to be able to live, according to its vigor, under the most imperfect conditions and forms, if such be the case.  Politics is the external system, this Tantalus-like busyness about external change.

It is apparent from his latest work that Dr R. believes that Christianity and the Church are to be saved by ‘the free institutions.’ If this faith in the saving power of politically achieved free institutions belongs to true Christianity, then I am no Christian, or, even worse, I am a regular child of Satan, because, frankly, I am indeed suspicious of these politically achieved free institutions, especially of their saving, renewing power. . . . [I] have had nothing to do with ‘Church’ and ‘state’ – this is much too immense for me.  Altogether different prophets are needed for this, or, quite simply, this task ought to be entrusted to those who are regularly appointed and trained for such things.  I have not fought for the emancipation of ‘the Church’ an more than I have fought for the emancipation of Greenland commerce, or women, of the Jews, or of anyone else. (53-54)

Kierkegaard continues on in this letter to drive home with all clarity that external institutions and systems cannot essentially hinder or encourage Christian faith.  The question I have with respect to contemporary forms of ‘liberation theology and thought’ is whether this reading and presentation within Kierkegaard’s larger project can truly be said to move towards the liberation of the individual, that is, beyond political/economic (Greenland), gender (women), or religious (Jew) boundaries.

Whether or not Kierkegaard is being completely ironic he concedes space for those who can understand and interpret the larger social systems (different prophets).  I also think it is important that he encourages any who can improve on their surroundings to do so.  I say this is important not because it is a minor concession by Kierkegaard but because it is assumed.  If someone would try to critique him on this level he would likely ask how ignorant that person is in thinking that someone should not improve conditions around them only that something must transcend the quantitative value (and it still is value) that externals can play in life.

Some hate for The Tree of Life; Or, my apparent obsession with AUFS

I wrote an initial comment over at AUFS on my first impression of The Tree of Life.  And the more I think about it the more I can’t stand the film.  This is a reflective position and not a commentary on aspects of the film.  However, the movie lends itself to being processed in a larger cultural and political context and I think the context demands more of the movie than it offers.  I think the movie can be viewed in part if not entirely as Jack processing his childhood.  So Jack wakes up aloof from his beautiful wife (who I don’t think he says a word to).  Lights a candle for his dead younger brother.  Goes to work and sits atop a high tower.  Calls the other alpha male (his father) to apologize for something about the dead brother.  As I process the movie another conversation at AUFS comes to mind in which Brad states that the church has never been able to appropriate or face up to modernity.  That may be true but why is there any need when you have a movie like this which causes modernity’s implosion in the psyche of the man who builds modernity (powerful ‘modern’ architect).  This modern man traverses and encompasses all of evolution in order to find meaning for the death of his brother.  Oh, and who was that middle child again?

I don’t think it is helpful to minimize the white middle-class male experience but how can this expression not invite scorn in our context?  What if Jack was the First Nations man I encountered walking down the street a month ago.  I suspect he might have a few more things to ‘process’ from his childhood experience but he has no high tower in which to brood.  In this neighbourhood being young and native tends to invite things that do not allow for contemplation and so he is jumped and hit with an eight-ball over the head.  He continues on down the street with blood flowing down over him.  Oh wait, where was I again?  Oh yes I was up to the dinosaurs.  The AUFS view of this movie is all the more striking with its general tenor of liberation.  There seemed to be nothing here that would change the modern capitalist man or system.  He found his inner-peace.  Isn’t this the kind of thing that gets disemboweled over at AUFS?

It’s funny I was actually planning to right a post on my ‘conversion’ experience that I attribute in part to the posts and related scholars and thought that floats around at AUFS.  I am trying to shed vacuous and bankrupt theological language or at least press it for its implied meaning and implications.  This is a good time as I am entering into the ordination process with my conference and need to comment on our confession . . . well, we’ll see how good it turns out.

In any event I am not trying to take some jab at the general thinking and expression at AUFS.  I just find the engagement with this movie to be a little dissonant with the larger environment.  I should also point out that many of the comments were not actually made by AUFS regulars.  But as I mentioned in my comment over there I was really surprised it did not get a harsher review.   I suppose it provided some good intellectual and aesthetic fodder . . . and maybe that is all that it amounts to though the movie and the conversation seemed to be pointing to more.

There were two audible responses to the movie in my theatre.  First was a loud yawn.  This was only a partially accurate review in my mind.  I was sucked into the ‘evolution’ (but would have been just as happy to see it as an I-Max piece) as well as moved by many other visual landscapes.  Some of the social and psychological commentary was suggestive and provocative (as Brad elaborates in his original post).  The other audible review was probably more accurate.  It was a sarcastic wow-wee.  Of course this probably spouted by a white middle-class male.