On Diaspora Book Event: Chapter 5, “The Differentiality of Differentialities”

The first line of Barber’s introduction (as other commenters have already noted) cautions that the book is “not easily placed.” Indeed, parsing through the bibliography and table of contents of this boldly named book with a flesh-tone cover, I wasn’t immediately sure what to make of it. But, by the third chapter, I’d become somehow convinced that it was directly responding to the guttural concerns about religion that sucked me into the field in the first place. I once found it inspiring to be an uncounted (and unaccountable) nomad in the world of “identitarian” religious belonging. I had an intuition that uncharted space existed—that some religio-spiritual intellectual space existed that was open to play and invention, where people might crib from those dominant traditions when necessary, without feeling the need to be accountable to them by some form of blood pact. Years ago, I convinced myself that theology was a suitable place to do this. But, almost in spite of the speculative absurdity of its own history, theology remains a discipline that’s deeply bound to the stolid structures of academic Christianity. I’ve gotten a bit weary. Perhaps some of the spit and vinegar has seeped out of me. Barber’s project is a little breath of possibility, for the way that it both occupies and yet also deterriotorializes that theological infrastructure. The book may not be easily placed, but there’s something in its intrinsic logic that I find easy to affirm.

What does this fifth chapter do? It begins by drawing our attention explicitly to what will have already become painfully obvious to the sympathetic reader: we’re afflicted.

Don’t forget to purchase On Diaspora!

Dan Barber’s On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity is available for purchase direct from the publisher, as well as from Amazon (US, UK) and Book Depository — and wherever fine books are sold!

Even if you can’t get it in time to follow along with the book event, you should rest assured that the questions raised by this book will continue to shape conversations in theology — blog-based or otherwise — for a long time to come.

Totem and Taboo

I’ve been reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo over the past couple weeks. One thing that strikes me is how foreign his approach is to contemporary academic sensibilities, at least in the circles I’m most familiar with. Obviously no one wants to use racist and derogatory terms such as “savages” and “primitive peoples,” but it seems that the solution that most of those doing ambitious philosophical and theoretical work in the West have chosen is never to mention such people at all.

On Diaspora Book Event: Chapter 4, “Christianity, Religion, and the Secular”

In this chapter, Daniel Barber exposes the logic of what could be called “universalizing supersessionism,” a logic at work in the construction of Christianity in relation to Judaism and other “religions”, and then again at work in the construction of secularism in relation to religion. Barber describes the way the logic works this way:

In each case, what is at stake is the construction not only of a position of judgment, but also of a plane of reality in which such a position becomes normative. In other words, it a matter not only of asserting the dominance of a particular position—whether Christianity or secular—but of involving this position within a broader plane of reality, such that the dominance of this particular position is mediated by its full congruence with the plane itself. (100-101).

In a quotation from Gil Anidjar in which this logic is connected with the construction of “white” as the universal, supersessionist position in the category of race, Anidjar calls “white” the “unmarked race” (111). The reference to the “unmarked” position in the category of race offers us a way to understand in other terms the nature of the logic that Barber is describing. The logic of universalizing supersessionism is deeply embedded within the very structure of language itself.

John Hick, RIP

Word going around the internets is that philosopher of religion and theologian John Hick has passed away.  Although I am not an active follower of his work and I fundamentally oppose his Christology, I am a fan, and my academic career so far has carried his scholarship with me.  I read his books in college (God Has Many Names, God and the Universe of Faiths), in divinity school (the classic An Interpretation of Religion), and I have used his books in my own teaching (Death & Eternal Life).

On Diaspora Book Event: Chapter 3 “The World in the Wake of Pauline Thought”

Out of all the chapters of Dan Barber’s excellent On Diaspora, this is the one I have found most personally challenging. Reading this chapter (which he passed along to me in manuscript form about a year ago) was decisive in weakening my deep desire to find a more or less purely “optimistic” reading of Paul. It’s all the more powerful for me in that arguably Barber’s primary point of reference here is also one of mine: namely, Taubes.

The argument of this chapter traces out the path by which a political stance can be so uncompromisingly radical that it effectively becomes conservative — and hence, even as its primary importance is genealogical, it can also serve as a cautionary tale.

Why is birth control the Catholic Church’s last stand?

To many observers, the Catholic hierarchy’s opposition to birth control seems nonsensical — they might as well oppose ice cream. It seems like a win-win: the liberals are happy that women get reproductive freedom, but meanwhile if you’re anti-abortion, it seems like avoiding unwanted pregnancies in the first place is the best possible solution. What’s not to like? Or more to the point: why are they making this, of all the many Catholic moral teachings, the cross they’re willing to die on, even as the laity has long since stopped caring?

I don’t think we can explain this simply through misogyny or fear of feminine sexuality, etc., because there are plenty of misogynists in the world who don’t make a point of picking a fight with the president of the United States over birth control. This birth control issue seems to be almost exclusively a Catholic “thing,” so it has to have a Catholic-specific explanation. I propose that the answer can be found in a historic compromise set forth by one of the most influential thinkers you’ve never heard of: namely, Clement of Alexandria, a second-century Christian philosopher.

In the history of the Catholic Church, Clement’s compromise was arguably almost as defining a moment as Paul’s declaration that Gentile Christians were not obligated to meet Jewish ritual requirements.

Thinking the Absolute Conference Registration

Registration is now live for the ‘Thinking the Absolute: Philosophy, Speculation and the End of Religion’ Conference, June 29 – 1 July, Liverpool Hope University, UK. Keynotes: Iain Hamilton Grant,Catherine Malabou, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant. CFP remains open untilthe end of February. For registration form and CFP, visit http://www.hope.ac.uk/acpr/call-for-papers.html

On Diaspora Book Event: Chapter 2 “Diaspora”

This is a guest post from Ry Siggelkow, a PhD student in Theology and Ethics and Princeton Theological Seminary. He blogs at Rain and the Rhinoceros. – APS

It is true, On Diaspora, as Dan Barber puts it in his introduction, is not “easily placed.” For those of us who have been in conversation with Dan over the past few years this is, of course, unsurprising. To say, in agreement with Dan, that this book is not “easily placed” is just another way of saying that this book is something of a success. That is to say, Dan has, I think, successfully executed a very difficult enterprise; not only does this work amount to a massive overhaul in the ways we think of Christianity, religion, and secularity, it really is an invitation to completely reconceptualize—in one fell swoop—the basic assumptions and methods of a number of theoretical discourses. Dan should be applauded, then, for his originality and creativity and for the remarkable sophistication with which he treats the matters at hand. Indeed, we might even say that, the book itself stands, as a provocative expression of the kind of diasporic account of existence that Dan seeks to develop throughout.

A call for revival

I have been teaching Buber’s I and Thou and finding it amazingly productive of thought and discussion. I wonder if, after such a long period where Levinas has had a corner on the “ethics of respect for the Other” market, the time may be ripe for a Buber revival.