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Preemptive Columbus Day Post: “With all due respect, Mr. Fitzgerald, Murder’s on the pulse…”

Sunday, October 10, 2010 — danbarber

It’s a day of shame.  There’s an obvious reason for this, having to do with the capacity of a nation-state to enshrine as one of its “holidays” the commemoration of a figure who represents the colonizing project.  As Nas once put it:  “The Indians helped the Pilgrims / and in return the Pilgrims killed them / I call your holiday hellday.”  Columbus Day, like Thanksgiving, is adequately understood as a hellday.

Yet there is another, less considered reason for feeling shameful on Columbus Day, and this has to do with the “construction” of its commemoration.  For, nowadays at least, the celebration of Columbus Day is bound up with Italian-Americans’ need for a day that would recognize their own particular contribution to “American culture.”  Columbus Day is meant to be a day of pride for Italian-Americans—and this, I am trying to say, bears its own peculiar shame.  Columbus, it will be noted, was Italian—but what is an Italian? And what does Columbus have to do with Italian-Americans? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Althusser, Gramsci, Melville, Mythology. 5 Comments »

Discursive Tradition and Ethical Thinking

Sunday, September 12, 2010 — danbarber

Some proposed guidelines for the maintenance of intellectual virtue amidst any attempt to affirm a discursive tradition: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in blog posts. 9 Comments »

New JCRT

Thursday, August 12, 2010 — danbarber

Some readers of the blog may be interested in checking out the new issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.  It’s a very “full” issue, with a ton of excellent articles and reviews.  Most notably, perhaps, there is Joshua Delpech-Ramey’s interview with DJ Spooky.  AUFS contributors are well-represented:  Anthony and I have a co-written article; I have a review of Nathan Kerr’s book; and Christopher Rodkey has a review of Carl Raschke’s most recent book. [Warning PDFs!]

Posted in Shameless Promotion. 15 Comments »

Some Thoughts on the Politics of “Suburbs”

Tuesday, August 3, 2010 — danbarber

The place I grew up was not exactly the suburbs, more like some post-industrial small city out of a Springsteen song.  Nonetheless, there’s something about Arcade Fire’s new album that I find affectively striking.  This is because the titular “suburbs” are not an actual place—though, sadly, they are also that—but something like the condition of possibility for contemporary North American existence.   It is in this sense, I think, that we can speak of the political character of The Suburbs.  They have made an album that is not “realist” so much as an encounter with that which enables what we call reality—the feelings, the patterns of thought, the capacities of sense that one cannot avoid encountering.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in aesthetics, apocalyptic, Benjamin, ecology, Gnosticism, nihilism. 10 Comments »

On the Critique of Religion

Thursday, June 17, 2010 — danbarber

One of the more intriguing moves made in the recent Kingdom-World-Church manifesto was Thesis 4, which begins: “Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion.”  The body of the thesis goes on to argue that this is all the worse for worship, or liturgy, or ecclesiology, for these are all liable to become “religious,” rather than properly divine, as they should be.  This upsets the more ecclesiologically- or ontologically-oriented, and without taking the side of these orientations I would nonetheless like to ask: why is Christianity immune from the critique of religion?

I imagine the response would be: “actually, it is not immune from such critique – isn’t that precisely the point of the thesis?”  But there is something subtler at work here.  By subjecting Christianity to the appellation of religion, one actually immunizes Christianity from being counted as religion.  Christianity may fail, i.e. become religious, but its failure is different from the failures enacted by all other religions.  When these other religions fail, they are becoming themselves, but when Christianity fails, it is becoming something other than itself – it is failing to be itself.

Thus, as much as the critique of Christianity-as-religious ideology is necessary, it appears that this critique could be all the more ideological insofar as it locates this critique of Christian religion within Christian theology.  Does theology precede religion, or is it not the case that theology is produced by religion?  If the latter is true, then it will be difficult just to be against religion.

Posted in blog posts. 97 Comments »

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing Response: What Should We Do With/As Plasticity?

Thursday, March 18, 2010 — danbarber

I found particularly compelling, out of the many intriguing aspects of this Afterword, the link between plasticity and materialism.  What is specifically interesting here is the connection between plasticity and political materialism—while the capacity of plasticity to conceptualize an ontological materialism has been a recurring theme, it is only here that the link between plasticity and political materialism comes into explicit (though very brief) view.  What should we do?  With our brains, yes, but the question’s force extends more widely.  The ability to ask this question presupposes that there is something that we can do, that the future is subject to our decision (even if only sometimes).  It is here that we see the link between political and ontological materialism—the refusal of any outside becomes the condition of possibility for political capacity.

This last point seems, to me, to be one of the key lessons of the ongoing polemic against Levinas, and against the conscription of Derrida into a Levinasian manner of thinking.  So my question is how to think this sort of decision, or if decision is not the best word, then the question is how to think the answer to—or the ability to answer—“What should we do?”  Furthermore, should the discussion of Freud on Michelangelo’s Moses, where what is valorized is the refusal to give into inclination—and this, notably, is tied up in the refusal to flee a people, a refusal that has a divine character—be understood as a condition for becoming adequate to the question of “What should we do?”

Finally, I think it is worth recalling Ryan’s discussion of Malabou’s account of the fantastic.  What does the fantastic, or the imaginary—or, to use my own preference, Deleuze’s mythmaking function / fabulation—have to do with the ability, thought by plasticity, to decide on our future?  Plasticity, in its ontological and political materialism, rightly resists the exteriority that expropriates from us the ability to decide on the future, but must it refer to the fantastic in order to give determination to this decision?

Posted in Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing event. 10 Comments »

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Afterword

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 — danbarber

Of the Impossibility of Fleeing – Plasticity

The “Afterword” begins with a question that has already captured some interest in our discussions (perhaps especially with regard to Derrida and Levinas): How is one to imagine a “way out” when there is no exteriority?  In order to display the impasses involved in this situation, Malabou resorts to prose that is almost Adornian: “Something that is so constituted as to make fleeing impossible while also making it necessary to flee this impossibility” (65); or, “It is not a question of how to escape closure but rather of how to escape within closure itself.” (65)  Again, the Levinasian approach is set forth as a foil, since Malabou wants to distinguish the kind of escape proper to plasticity from Levinas’ manner of escape, which hinges on a desire for somewhere and something else.  For Malabou, there can be an escape without the other, a way out without exteriority, because of the character of plasticity.  Plastic can both give and receive form, it can belong to the setting-in of form as well as the explosive undoing of form.  What this means, then, is that transformation and metamorphosis are possible within plasticity—or perhaps it is better to say that whatever takes on form, whatever destroys form, whatever takes leave of form, is always already plastic.  Malabou proceeds to note that such plasticity is central to the mobility of the system in Hegel, and then to demonstrate, at greater length, why plasticity is also in agreement with Heidegger’s thought.  The key idea here is that every instance of transcendence in Being and Time is brought forth by means of modification.  There is never any question of Dasein going beyond itself, for its very essence lies in its own modification.  Even authenticity “is only a modified, transformed grasp of existence.  There is no change of ground.  The ‘way out’ is achieved by an upheaval within daily existence itself.” (70)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing event. 2 Comments »

Models of Theological Discourse

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 — danbarber

As part of a project I’m currently working on, I’ve been thinking through the various presently-existing models for thinking about theological (or more ambiguously religious) discourse.  Specifically, what I have in mind here are ways in which theological discourse is positioned with regard to philosophy.  There are, as far as I can imagine, four models:

(1) Philosophy as condition of possibility for theology.  Here I have in mind the approaches of figures such as Heidegger (especially in his “Phenomenology and Theology” essay) or Bergson.  Theological or religious discourse is admitted, but only when it is understood that that such discourse is a specific borrowing or deployment of a more fundamental and generic mode of thought that is properly philosophical.

(2) The cultural-linguistic model.  The common assumption, following in a Wittgensteinian vein, would be that there is a basic incommensurability between various cultures and their respective discourses.  Theology, in its particularity, is thus granted a specific autonomy that does not need to pass through more generic conditions of possibility or thinkability.  Exemplars would include Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Barth (and his followers).

(3) Postmodern Thomism.  Shares with (1) the desire to speak generically—i.e. at the level of the ontological or whatever, but also shares with (2) the desire to make theological discourse primary.  This is accomplished, of course, by claiming that it is only (or it is preeminently) with theology that one finds the proper means of thinking being.  Milbank, of course, is the one who has pursued this project most extensively.

(4) Theology as unthought remainder.  This model is distinctive in its unwillingness to position theological discourse at the level of the generic or the particular (or some combination thereof).  It might be best to say that theology functions as a coefficient that enables a paraphilosophical discourse.  Only by encountering theological discourse more seriously does it become possible for philosophy to fulfill its innovative tasks, which have been hampered by a premature jettisoning or overcoming of such discourse.  While their operations are singular, this model is common to Agamben, Žižek, and Derrida.

What do you think?

Posted in Agamben, Aquinas, Barth, Derrida, Hauerwas, Heidegger, Milbank, philosophy, theology, Zizek. 32 Comments »

Influential Books: AUFS for the Uninitiated 3

Thursday, January 14, 2010 — danbarber
 
When Adam asked me to do this, I was excited to go ahead with it.  When I started thinking about books that heavily influenced me, however, it quickly became clear to me that I had a tendency not to think in terms of “books.”  I’m not sure I know exactly what, then, I think in terms of, perhaps “ideas” or “problems,” it would be best to say.  So what I’ve tried to do is name books that have functioned as shifting points in my patterns of thinking — books, that is, that have helped me solve problems, or that have helped me discover new, better problems (which is probably better).  As an aside, I should say that the only book that really functioned as a directly affirmative experience, in my memory, is one that Anthony already mentioned: Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Reading it, I had the intuition that yes, this is exactly how I think of the possible convergence of immanence and the theory of religion.
 
In any case, the first book I’d name is by Derrida, the one translated as Speech and Phenomena, with the essay “Différance” appended. 
Posted in AUFS for the Uninitiated. 10 Comments »

Theology of Money – 4. Politics of Money

Monday, December 7, 2009 — danbarber

Goodchild begins this chapter by noting that money is “inseparable from the institution of the market” (123).  What then is this institution that is the market?  He focuses on ways in which the nature of the market may be concealed by its appearance.  There is a fundamental egalitarianism to the market, for any person has the right to participate in it as an “owner of goods” and an “owner of labor,” and to do so as “a free agent capable of entering into voluntary exchanges and contracts” (123).  But this is a pure formal egalitarianism, for the market-subject is an abstraction.  In reality, there are a number of dependencies—material relations, physical existence, and social obligations—that contravene the autonomy of the market-subject.  Similarly, the functioning of the market is not possible apart from “political relations of force,” which ultimately have recourse to “the threat of sovereign power to enforce contracts and to safeguard property” (125).  In short, the market appears to—and, insofar as it is an institution of representation, does—engender freedom and peace precisely as it disavows its dependencies and relies on a foundational violence.  The politics of money is a representational violence.

According to Goodchild, any resistance to this politics of money will have to find—to invent—a new modality.  Protest (at least on its own) fails, for money promises, it responds to and creates desires, and so the negation of protest cannot compete in any sustained manner.  Violent confrontation also fails insofar as it is already conditioned by the politics of money, by which such confrontation obtains the wealth for its military power.  Resistance, at least as it is presently imagined, does not escape the orbit of the politics of money. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Goodchild, Theology of Money event. 6 Comments »
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