Online PhD Dissertation: “The Holy Fools: A Theological Enquiry”

Frequent commenter Andy points us to a pdf of his thesis entitled “The Holy Fools: A Theological Enquiry”. For those interested in Foucault, the holy fools, Wedding Crashers, or any mix of related topics, this thesis will be of interest to you.

AAR 2009: Taking stock

This AAR was very good for me overall. Friday night, Dan Barber and I got to meet Bruce Rosenstock, after attending the great session he was a part of; we all went out that night and also got to hang out a bit at my session the next morning. My paper was well-received and the session itself generated some great conversation, including a conversation with Catherine Keller, whom I was meeting for the first time.

The Zizek-Altizer session was good, but somewhat disappointing, in that the system of having hand-selected responses from the audience (which sounded great to me going in) didn’t work quite as envisioned, in part due to Zizek’s long-windedness. Receptions were interesting, as I met more new people than I usually do, including James Cone, whose hand I shook but who almost certainly had already forgotten I existed even before the handshake was finished — but my main goal was to be able to tell my students in liberation theology that I had met him, so: mission accomplished on that front.

Beyond that, I had very productive conversations with publishers, ate some good meals, heard some good papers, and bought some interesting books. There was a nice restaurant in the conference center that appeared to be organized around the Unibroue beers, so I enjoyed that, and I also had pho for the first time in Chinatown, where I got to talk to an actual non-academic Montreal resident with whom I shared a table. Sadly, that was about as much exploration of Montreal that I did unguided by AAR-related concerns; my biggest regret on this front is that I didn’t get to take advantage of the possibility of buying French books.

Feel free to share your own experiences, or links to posts thereupon, in comments.

Book Discussion Reminder

This is just a reminder that it’s not too late to start your Week One reading of The Recognitions.  I’ve added an Amazon link to the book on the sidebar, should you be in inclined to an impulse buy. We’ll kick things off on Friday.  Hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I.

Airport security and aesthetics

One guy tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, and now millions of shoes have been taken off and put through X-ray machines as a result. A couple of guys had a hare-brained scheme to mix deadly chemicals in the plane’s bathroom — which wouldn’t even have worked, as I understand it — and now we have millions of little plastic bags with little travel-sized toiletries.

Some might admittedly view these new practices as over-reactions. Indeed, some might even mourn the fact that there is no foreseeable way out of these stupid practices, as no politician wants to be the one who loosens up the rules and then gets blamed for the next terrorist attack.

But I think we need to look at the bright side — this is an opportunity for the greatest performance-art piece in the history of the world. All we need is a truly dedicated artist to stage an attempted attack and a new bizarre practice can be imposed upon millions of travellers for years to come. (Perhaps we could brainstorm in comments.) This heroic artist would need to be selfless enough not only to risk jail time, but to be willing to forego claiming credit for the piece, as the confession that it was merely a prank might endanger the new practice’s continuation (though who knows?). Only years later could the artist finally come forward and “sign” their massive work, which had played out for years on a stage the size of the entire nation, perhaps adding a note explaining that the project was meant as a commentary on our security-obsessed age, etc.

In a further twist, perhaps next time you’re unlacing your shoes in order to put them through an X-ray machine along with hundreds of your fellow citizens, you should ask yourself, “Has this already happened? Was the shoe-bomber just a performance artist?”

AAR Paper: “Patristic Perspectives on the Cross: A Reinterpretation”

[The following is the paper I presented at this year's AAR meeting in AAR, in a session on "Trauma and the Cross."]

A Thought Experiment About the Gospel

Recently I was engaged by a thought: is there any necessary correlation between Christ’s injunction to spread the gospel and conversion/admission into a singular community of believers?  Now, obviously, communities of faith did emerge — and perhaps it could even be said that, practically speaking, they inevitably emerge — but the fact that the gospel (edit: would appear to) precedes the community seems significant to me.

I read most of the New Testament in terms of purposiveness: namely, that the purpose of the church, and thus the sum total of Christian activity, is the advancement of the gospel.  E.g., on the one hand, if this means women must keep their heads covered and stay silent in one community, do it; but on the other hand, if this means women must serve crucial and vocal leadership roles in another community, do it.  Really, the only operative rule is by any means necessary.  (For this reason, Paul can even say in Philippians 1.18 that the motivations of false preachers doesn’t matter, as long as the gospel itself is advanced.)  The community that emerges seems ultimately incidental, and perhaps even wholly contingent on how, to whom, and where the gospel is spread.

By this I’m not trying to simply reiterate contextual theology.  Even there, there is still a singular community — it’s just dressed up differently from place to place/people to people. Is there, though, warrant to privilege a singular community’s role vis-à-vis the gospel.  Of course, it can be said that any such community embodies the gospel, and to that extent it is important, but why the assumption that the gospel has but one potential body? This seems the case only if the gospel is strictly a determinate, content-laden message.  If the gospel that is spread, however, is more precisely in line with the Prophets, and as such is a radical call to and empowerment for universal justice, wherein those who are most low are brought most high, the ecclesial embodiment would seem to require more than just contextual and cosmetic differences — indeed more even than the infinite expansiveness of some abstract or spirtual concept (i.e., “the Church”) — but outright multiplicity.

What we would have, then, are communities of faith, whose participants are converted by and to the advancement of the gospel. In this way, they do not become  members of or appendage to the “the Body,” but rather themselves become physical embodiments of the gospel.  It is my conjecture that some embodiments will look more alike than others, in which case communal embodiments may well emerge — but at other times, their interests may very well appear opposed.  (Is it possible, one wonders, that they might even truly be opposed or contradictory?)  In either case, this is where my thought took me, and where it remains, and where I leave it here, in a world of multiple embodiments of the gospel, would they not (these embodiments) then be subject to the same physical principles as any other body: that of emergence, evolutionary organization & adaptation, decay & dissolution, etc.?

The Three Principles of La Borde Clinic

I’ve been slowly making my way through François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée, which, obviously, is a biography of both Deleuze and Guattari, focusing on their work together and how their very different lives crossed. Tonight I read the chapter on La Borde clinic, an experimental psychiatric hospital that Guattari worked at, and really co-led after some years, with Jean Oury.

La Borde has interested me for many years after my first research stint at the Institute for Nature and Culture where my task was to look into models of trans- or interdisciplinarity. In this chapter I came across the three principles that founded La Borde and that continue to guide it today. I find them to be a fascinating model and one that seems so simple and obvious for bringing about change and fostering a good, communist society. Perhaps that is why it is so hard to do.

1. Democratic centralism assuring the prominence of group administration. This arose out of a Marxist-Leninist principle that aimed for the withering away of those “little priests of the people”.
2. Corollary to this  was the principle that each must be capable of doing both manual labour and intellectual labour (developed from the notion of a Communist utopia, which is really a Platonic ideal, doing things for both the body and the mind and removing alienation from production). Anyone could be called upon to perform menial and administrative tasks as well as medical tasks. Part of this was systematizing a rota of duties.
3. The anti-bureaucratic principle is the last and was the institution of a communitarian organization with the making responsibilities, tasks and salaries in common.

This lead to a kind of summary mission statement that I’ve roughly translated this way: “The permeability of spaces, the freedom to move about, the criticism of professional roles and qualifications, the plasticity of institutions, and the necessity of therapeutic society for the sick (Dosse, p. 56).” The goal of La Borde was a kind of communist utopia and obviously there were always problems that arose in the pursuit of that goal, but that there was and is such an attempt in the world cheered me some.

A pedagogical breakthrough; with bonus thoughts on “the church”

I have shared with you my struggle to get my students to understand the dialectic. Today, going over the section of Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk where she talks about the “conversion experience” of feminists and then even more where she talks about the relationship between the feminist “base community” and the institutional church, something started to click. Using Cornel West’s description of the dialectic as “negate, preserve, transform,” my students were suddenly able to fill in the gaps themselves and more than one said, “Wow, you could really use this on everything!” Hegel would be proud.

I also thought that this would be an appropriate time to share Ruether’s thoughts on the relationship that critical and transformative movements should have with the institutional church (Sexism and God-Talk, 205-206):

A feminist base community is an autonomous, self-gathered community that takes responsibility for reflecting on, celebrating, and acting on the understanding of redemption as liberation from patriarchy. Such a community might take on as many or as few of the functions of Church as they choose….

The formation of such feminist base communities does not necessarily imply a sectarian rejection of institutional churches. People who find their primary support in such feminist communities might also participate in various structures of institutional church life…. The creation of “liberated zones” in at least some sectors of institutional churches would be seen as one of the “fields of mission” of the base community.

The exodus out of the institutional Church into the feminist base community would be for the sake of creating a freer space from which to communicate new possibilities to the institutional Church. The relationship between the two becomes a creative dialectic rather than a schismatic impasse. Indeed, precisely as one takes seriously one’s responsibility to transform the historical Church, it becomes essential to have a support community that really nurtures liberated ways of living together rather than remaining crabbed and frustrated by religious experiences of alienation and negation of this vision.

A dialectical relationship between base community and historical institution is also necessary if one is serious about the communication and historical transmission of the liberating options of the base community. By retaining lines of communication into the historic institution, one can also find ways to communicate these options to a much larger public than is possible from the resources of a small group. Many other groups of people can hear that “good news.” New communities can be touched by the flame and take fire. Some parts of the historical structures then become vehicles for transmitting the message of the Gospel as redemption from patriarchy. Eeven if the base community itself dissolves, the historic institution becomes a means of transmitting the memory of these new options to other groups and new generations. Only by this creative dialectic between renewal community and historical institution is the Church regenerated by the Spirit within history. This is the inescapable paradox of living in the liberating community within the framework of historical existence.

That seemed relevant to recent discussions about “the church.”

I’ll note that once we tackled this particular dialectic, my students were so eager to apply it to new things that they asked whether the institutional church also undergoes its own dialectic in its relationship with the base community. We concluded that it does in fact, and that the process is best summarized as “negate [these communities are evil and Marxist! GAH!], preserve [but people do seem to really like them...], co-opt.”

Yet another to-do list

For some reason, AAR always seems like a more significant dividing line for me than the end of the first semester (or quarter this time around), and so my mind is turning toward what I need to do in the next few months — essentially until the time my Agamben translation is due, which is also the end of the winter quarter. I invite everyone to indulge their superego along with me if desired.

Any takers?

In the spirit of the periodic CFPs on “religion and violence,” I wonder if we could somehow put together a conference on “nation-states and violence” or “money and violence” or “natural resources and violence” or “race and violence” or “sex and violence.” Violence comes in so many delightful packages — though I’m sure religion is flattered by the attention it gets in this context, other causes of violence deserve investigation as well.