Future Christ is out already in the UK, but isn’t slated to be available in the US and Canada until late February. For those who would like the book before then it is available from The Book Depository with free International shipping. I think the price actually works out to a little less than what Amazon is selling it for in the US as well.
A certain theoretical homology between Radical Orthodoxy and Qutbism hit me this evening while doing some background reading for the Speculative Medevialisms event. The connection was made while reading Bruce Holsinger’s chapter on Derrida’s medievalism in The Premodern Condition, which uses Catherine Pickstock’s polemic against Derrida in After Writing as a foil. It’s been awhile since I’ve read Pickstock, but Holsinger’s criticisms seem to me unassailable and crystallized some misgivings I had with Pickstock’s texts way back when about the flatness of her reading. But, that isn’t surprising since, after all, this was Holsinger’s goal. What is, well, perhaps not surprising, but interesting, was the structural similarity between Pickstock’s “utter lack of rhetorical modesty” (as Holsinger diagnoses her constant use of words like ‘only’, ‘optimum’, ‘alone’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’, and the like) and the same lack of rhetorical modesty in the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the interesting aspects of the upcoming Speculative Medievalisms conference is the use of “specimen texts” (presumebly this is why it the organizers are calling it an atelier). Some texts I’ll be using for my paper, “The Speculative Angel”, have been uploaded now. In addition to Thomas’ now standard angelology of purely spiritual beings and their basis in Pseudo-Dionysius, I’ve included a short text by the Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun and three selections, in draft translation, from French thinkers Henry Corbin, Guy Lardreau (with Christian Jambet), and Gilles Grelet. If you’re interested in contemporary forms of gnosticism operative in philosophical theory you may find those short translations of interest.
Due to some travel-related problems I have been asked to fill in for a speaker who is unable to attend the upcoming Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier hosted at King’s College London. It looks like a very good conference and I like the laboratory aspect of the event (check out the conference program for “specimen texts”). This, though, seems like a Renaissance idea, no? Though, of course, history is in many ways a nominalist discipline. Anyway, I’ll be presenting on angelology, building off of work I’m doing for an article and the theorist of darkness Ben Woodard will be responding. I’m looking forward to doing this with Ben since our work is generally on the same material, but we work from very different axioms and frames and come to very different conclusions. Since disagreement is often more illuminating and more interesting than agreement that should make for a vibrant encounter.
The details of an edited volume based on Syracuse University’s second Postmodernism, Culture, and Religion have been released. The volume considers questions of sexuality and feminism in relation to Continental philosophy of religion and hopefully it will bring some much needed attention to this topic.
On Friday the 17th I attended and spoke at the “Religion & Liberation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” conference hosted at Durham University and supported by their Centre for Catholic Studies and Faith and Globalization Programme. It was a great conference and included AUFS favorites Philip Goodchild and Roland Boer as keynotes. It was great to meet Roland in the flesh and he was every bit the legend I had heard. I was also nice to meet Andrew Brower Latz of Beyond Unknowing. At the conference I presented a paper entitled “The Poverty of the Earth: What does Nature have to do with Liberation?” and I’ve uploaded the audio for those may be interested. I make mention of another paper that was co-written with Daniel Colucciello Barber and that may be found at the JCRT website [warning PDF]
Urbanomic has released details about upcoming publications, including two Laruelle translations and a book on the philosophy of mathematics. They have also posted the transcript [warning PDF] of a conversation with Quentin Meillassoux that may be of interest to some readers.
Over the last week I submitted the final grades for the Roman Catholic theology course [syllabus] I was teaching at DePaul and, as this was the first course I’ve taught for non-majors, I’ve been thinking about what worked in the course and what did not work. It is difficult to judge from the student evaluations how things went, since only nine students completed it. I suspect this is due to DePaul’s policy of emailing the students and having them fill out evaluations on-line. The nine evaluations I received were mixed, from some giving me top marks and others giving me bottom marks, and if I were to rely on the content of these evaluations I wouldn’t really get much specific direction. Still, the fact that they are mixed has given me pause, since at Nottingham I have consistently received high above the department average. Read the rest of this entry »
Officially the UK release of my translation of François Laruelle’s Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (Amazon: UK
“Future Christ announces and enacts The Last Good News, as a non-Christian Heresy and a universal non-religion are conjoined to call forth a new Messiah or a new Humanity which is the new Christ. Laruelle here thinks philosophically and theologically to enact a universal rebellion realized through a heretical science, and if this book is above all an enactment of the heretical imperative, it not only brings a whole new meaning to heretical thinking, but sanctions it as that thinking which is now most our own.” – Thomas J.J. Altizer
“This lesson in heresy is a programme for thinking as a decent human being, thinking according to the victim each time a worldly description turns out to be a denunciation. At once Gnostic in its unlearned knowledge, heretical in its separation from the world, and Christian in its appeal to universal salvation, it performs a radically immanent struggle in the name of a future Christ that could be each and every one of us. Learning yet diverging from the centrality of the Shoah for modern thought, Laruelle makes a distinctive contribution to the political redeployment of a messianic motif.” – Philip Goodchild, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, University of Nottingham
I attended the recent AAR in Atlanta somewhat unexpectedly because I was lucky enough to be asked to interview for a great position. Interviews are strange things and I’m sure that’s true not just for the one being interviewed, but for those interviewing as well! There is a certain structural awkwardness built into the 15-minute conversation and it seems impossible to leave feeling like you gave your best answers. Even more impossible to prepare for all the possible questions that might be asked. For instance, since this is for a junior level position, I had given a lot of my preparation to thinking about undergraduate courses, but was asked about graduate courses. In the past I have thought about what kind of graduate courses I would like to teach, so I was relatively prepared for such a question, though not to the same level as if they had asked about undergraduate courses. Though, thinking now, I would be able to prepare two of the courses within a week, while the other, which would be the third of a trilogy, would require a little bit more research while the others were going on. But, I digress… Read the rest of this entry »
A few items I’ve been meaning to bring to people’s attention. First, François Laruelle’s latest book, Philosophie non-standard. Générique, Quantique, Philo-fiction, has just been released (Amazon.fr). Laruelle presented on ideas from this book at the conferences in the UK last March and the book promises to be the fullest expression on non-philosophy yet. You can see the table of contents and watch some interviews about the book at a website set up for its release (which includes information about the Philo-fictions journal). Also Laruelle related, John Caputo’s lectures on Laruelle (as well as Meillassoux and Brassier) are now online. I have not listened to them yet, in part out of trepidation since I feel a little too close to the material. Hopefully I can steel myself to do so soon.
Scu has two posts up [1, 2] commenting on a recent “debate” between Jonathan Safran Foer and Anthony Bourdain concerning eating animals, ethics, and the community of meat-eaters.
And, finally, an announcement of a conference investigating the relationship between Religion & Liberation at the University of Durham. Keynote speakers are AUFS favorites Roland Boer and Philip Goodchild.
Ben Myers has a post up ostensibly about the virtues of reading in a society where “progress is worshiped”. Of course reading is good and should be prized, though I’m not willing to go all the way with Myers’ assertion that reading is an act of theological resistance (whatever that might mean, we’re never told that by theologians who proclaim that Christianity is the true site of revolution and resistance). What really struck me, though, was the antagonism towards progress, towards the idea that our global society worships progress, which strikes me both as a bit too retro (Horkheimer and Adorno did this better than any theologian) and, more importantly, wrong.
In London today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gideon Osborne, delivered the UK’s spending review. For those who don’t know, this is essentially the budget and sets the spending agenda (in this case the lack of spending agenda) for the current government’s expected tenure. Gideon announced massive cuts to education, both for schools and universities, social housing, an inadequate spending increase for the NHS, a cut in community policing, and an increase for intelligence services. This government has essentially ended, for the foreseeable future, New Labour’s restoration of a society that valued social welfare. A number of independent think-tanks have come out saying that the poorest will be hit hardest by these spending cuts (George Eaton’s blog summarizes this) while the richest in the country will continue to pay less tax and this all despite the Con-Dem coalition’s constant braying of “fairness”. Read the rest of this entry »
Adam’s shared items Brad’s shared items
Adam Kotsko
Anthony Paul Smith
Brad Johnson
Thomas J. J. Altizer
dominicfox
JD
Nate Kerr
danbarber
thomaslynch
Alex
Thomas J Bridges
clayton crockett
Andy
spinozanetwork
lissamccullough
Ryan Krahn
Christopher Rodkey
jms
Robert Minto
Dan
voyou