Signatures

I have been advised to expand my knowledge of world religions during this year of “waiting around,” in an effort to make myself more marketable. My main goal is Islam, which is of course in very high demand and very of the moment anyway, and I picked up Akbar Ahmed’s Discovering Islam yesterday at Powell’s, more or less at random — if anyone has recommendations, I’m all ears.

While I was there, I decided to try to shore up my knowledge of Judaism (perhaps in service of a course on the “three great monotheisms”?), which has up till now mainly been a matter of osmosis rather than explicit study, and purchased Jacob Neusner’s Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. Investigating more closely, I found that it was signed by Neusner, with an inscription for Schubert Ogden.

Have any of you had similar experiences?

Non-Philosophy, Foucault Lecture Notes and More: A Link Post

Taylor Adkins of Speculative Heresy has finished the translation of The Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. You can download it as a pdf for free. It includes a few of my translations of entires. This is a real resource for anyone interested in coming to terms with Laruelle’s work and non-philosophy generally. Readers interested in non-philosophy may be interested to know that three Laruelle books will be coming out in the next year as well. Taylor is translating Philosophie et non-philosophie for Re:press, Rocco Gangle is translating Philosophies de la différence: Introduction critique for Continuum, and I am translating Le Christ futur: Une leçon d’hérésie for Continuum as well. All of these should be our in early 2010 and there has been some discussion of moving on to Principes de la non-philosophie shortly after and, depending on how Le Christ futur goes, I may approach Fordham or Continuum about publishing his other book on religion, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains (which translates into the lovely little title, Non-Philosphical Mysticism for Contemporary Use). All of which bodes well for the practice of non-philosophy in the English speaking world.

Also, Andy continues to post his summaries from Foucault’s final lecture course. He only has one summary to go before finishing the book. For those interested in Foucault and religion generally my friend Thomas Lynch has just published an article with Telos entitled “Confessions of the Self: Foucault and Augustine”. I also see another Nottingham postgrad, Patrick Aaron Riches, has published in this issue as well with the title “Political Theology and Pauline Law: Notes Toward a Sapiential Legality“.

Schelling & Theology

I may not yet be able to put together a proper book proposal on Schelling and theology — sorry, Continuum — so for now the world will have to settle for my newly-published epochal article in the The Journal of Religion. [PDF here]

Managing the economy

[One of the key points from Agamben's Il Regno e la Gloria is the idea of the state's management of the economy -- it doesn't determine individual choices, but sets up the basic rules to guide people's decisions so that they will tend toward the greatest possible good. The model here is divine providence, and you can read about it in more detail in the notes linked above. That's the inspiration behind this piece, but I think the post is understandable without it.]

Many commentators on the financial crisis have focused on the evil people in the big banks who, in their stupid stupidity (Daniel Davies), managed to bring the financial system to its knees. The state is forced to bail them out, but it must not forget that they have done wrong and are miserable failures as businessmen. I should say from the outset that I have no sympathy for the executives of the bailed-out firms and think that publicly scapegoating them could be a salutary exercise.

At the same time, I am going to advance a radical proposition: the ultimate fault lies not with them, but with the US government. That’s because the government lays down the ground rules. Within those rules, these businessmen sought the maximum possible short-term profit — both for their firms and for themselves personally. That is what they’re supposed to do. The government’s job is to set limits to the pursuit of profit so that they can’t act in such a way as to destroy the entire economy. The government did not do that. Therefore, it’s the government’s fault that the economy is presently in the toilet and — more importantly — the solution is not to get a few troubled firms over the hump to “go back to normal,” but to completely reconfigure the way the state shapes the economy.

Let me go into more detail here. In an article in the most recent Harper’s, Thomas Geoghegan points to the loosening of usury laws as the cause for the highly financialized, debt-based economy we all hate so much. When interest rates were capped, it was very often the case that manufacturing or other “real” economic activities could guarantee a better return on investment. Once the caps were removed, returns on finance became potentially infinite. Where did profit-seekers go, then?

Similarly, we all know about those stupid morons at GM who kept building gas-guzzlers, etc. — yet one of the primary goals of the US government is to secure access to cheap gas, and our entire built environment is premised on the idea that we can keep burning however much oil we want for all of eternity. The idea of a big vehicle appealed to safety-obsessed parents who have to drive their kids around constantly, and there was nothing in the regulatory environment to discourage GM from delivering that. So was GM stupid to seek out those short-term profits? No, within the terms set up by the government, they were actually quite smart! It was the terms that were stupid.

Perhaps the clearest example is the active production of a housing bubble by the Fed through lowered interest rates. The bubble was what made all the various subprime loans and collateralized debt obligations plausible as investment vehicles. The other main problem, credit default swaps, became a systemic issue when the government declined to regulate them as the insurance they effectively are — meaning there was no need to have money to cover the payouts. If you had the choice between collecting the “premium” and either keeping a large reserve sitting in the bank or putting that money out on the market, what would you choose? Especially if you thought that you were on the right side of the bets — or could just buy the opposite credit default swap to cover your ass if things started going wrong?

Yes, it’s terrible that people are so greedy and short-sighted — but the capitalist system is founded on greed, which except in rare cases always entails short-sightedness unless the state forces people to act in non-short-sighted ways.

Let’s be clear: I don’t think there should be a capitalist system at all! But if you’re going to have one, you need to be clear about the state’s role in creating the conditions under which economic activity takes place.

We are hobbled by the libertarian myth that the state and the economy exist as two separate planes that shouldn’t meet. In the immortal words of Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” — that is, if the state decides “not to intervene,” it is de facto setting up a situation in which the most ruthless and exploitative mode of capitalism will be the norm. Laissez faire is not a lack of intervention, but a specific kind of invervention. As soon as the state starts enforcing property laws, it can no longer wash its hands of the consequences of unfettered capitalism, because the state itself is ratifying and defending those consequences.

So in short, the state needs to face up to reality and do its fucking job, and state officers need to be ready to accept responsibility when they fail, meaning the loss of their jobs and the privileges that go along with them. Part of that job certainly seems to be to purge the upper levels of the financier class — but it is also more than that. The task is not simply to get rid of the “bad apples,” but to prevent systemically dangerous “bad apples” from arising in the first place.

Idea for a book series

We need to spearhead a “(very) sympathetic” series of introductions to major thinkers, focused on giving a clear articulation of their ideas, verging on and yet not quite crossing the line into outright advocacy. This latter step would be important because while “criticizing” an author for extrinsic reasons is unhelpful (here I would draw a tentative distinction between “criticism” and true “critique”), it’s perhaps equally unhelpful to be “charitable” toward an author by making him or her out to be an advocate of ideas that you’ve independently decided are “good.” Yet on the other hand, going so far into advocacy as to do drive-bys of other thinkers (“see, and this is why Derrida sucks!”) would also be counterproductive.

It would be, in short, a series that sought neither to make converts nor to innoculate the reader against a dangerous author, but simply to present the curious reader with a good case for why the author is worth their time and with some orientation to guide the reader’s own exploration of the author’s work.

For the Record: A Rejoinder

Dan Barber recently entered a brief on behalf of the recently published “old debate” on this very blog.  As regards to my own response to Dan’s essay in the latest volume of Political Theology, Dan’s questions and points, which he entered “for the record,” are well taken.  I want to be clear from the outset that in my response to Dan, I did not necessarily mean to write in the spirit of non-combat and judgment; and in fact, it is neither combat nor judgment as such that I would hope would occur but rather conversation. And I do think Dan is right that the most interesting point of conversation between the two of us in relation to our own respective “projects” would occur at the points of our divergence and convergence with regards to the reading of Yoder vis-a-vis analogy. I thought that I had tried to establish that point of conversation; however, to the extent that my piece has not adequately carried out or fostered conversation on that single point, it signals the need for a conversation that has yet to occur. It would be my hope that we could take up that point of conversation (even if it occurs at points of “combat” or “debate”) in the appropriate forum (even if that can’t be here — and I’m not sure it can be).

Having said that, I would nevertheless want to maintain that there is more going on in my piece than what Dan has portrayed here, more than just a “parroting” of Milbankian and analogical critiques of immanence, and more than a mere labelling of the Deleuzian position as idolatrous. And so, if I may, I would like to make a few points of my own “for the record”:

The internet brings out the worst in people

I seem to have made James K. A. Smith angry. As so often happens to me in blog conversations, my perhaps over-forceful articulation of my argument has led to personal attacks — or actually, meta-”personal attacks,” accusing me of making personal attacks.

It’s the classic asymmetry: I say they misunderstand something specifically, they come back with, “Oh, you’re sooooooooooo smart, you’re the only one who understands anything!”; I forcefully state a disagreement, they come back with, “You’re an intolerant asshole who can’t stand for anyone to disagree with you!” Are you sure about that last one? Who’s the one overreacting to disagreement here, really?

Say what you will of the limitations of question and answer sections at academic conferences — the social pressures that come with being physically present to others restrain this kind of behavior, at least until we regroup with our friends and start trash-talking people behind everyone’s back.

Now you’d think that a blog setting, with its lack of space limitations and its time-delayed format, would allow for a much richer conversation than could ever be possible at a conference. In practice, though, its removal of the face-to-face element most often seems to lead to a thorough interweaving of the shallow Q&A session and the post-session bitching to one’s friends. It’s a marvel of efficiency, if you think about it — like a compressed academic conference, plus Cheetos!

For the Record

In the recently published yet “old debate” (see two posts below), I find a new element, a kind of triangulation:  immanence is no longer misread by the advocates of analogical transcendence, it is now misread by an advocate of apocalyptic transcendence, who simultaneously opposes analogical transcendence.  This new misreading is extensive, and while the law of diminishing returns prevents me from going point by point, I’d like to remark on some basic points, if only for the record.

 

Kerr, in his reply to my argument for immanence, contends that “the unconditioned [can] never actually arrive as such within immanence,” and that this is due to the role of the virtual.  This confuses me, given that I spend a significant amount of space explaining exactly why I don’t think this criticism holds.  To be precise, I explicitly argue why I can “avoid any dualism between the unconditioned and the determinate conditions it exceeds.”  I then proceed to talk about the role of time, including how the unconditioned power of time should not be equated with the virtual.  My point in saying all this is to note that even though I anticipate and explain why the accusation Kerr makes does not hold, Kerr makes that accusation anyway without at all explaining, on his own side, what exactly is wrong with my explanation.

 

How, one might wonder, did I gain the ability to anticipate the accusation Kerr would make against immanence?  Actually, I found this accusation in Milbank, it was just that Kerr found it important to repeat Milbank (in basically identical form, and without taking into account my criticism of Milbank).  Compare, for instance, Kerr’s claim in the paragraph above with Milbank’s claim that, in Deleuze, “differentiation that liberates is an insistence and is never perfectly accomplished,” which “means that [Deleuze] can articulate the ontological conditions for revolution, but not for an achieved, or even constantly arriving [my italics; Kerr himself italicizes the same above], revolution.” 

 

Kerr, when looking for a reason that immanence doesn’t work, parrots Milbank’s claim that immanence cannot allow the arrival of whatever it makes possible.  Another move Kerr borrows from the analogy crowd is to toss Deleuze into the “sublime” basket.  This is simply wrong, but that’s an argument for another time.  I would just like to understand why Kerr, who is so critical of advocates of analogy, finds them so full of creditable, “borrowable” insights when it comes to Deleuze …

 

For what it’s worth, I would have found it more interesting to hear a criticism of Deleuze that arises from Kerr’s reading of Yoder, rather than his parroting of Milbank.  After all, Kerr and I share a refusal of analogy, and we have in common an admiration of Yoder.  Intriguingly, I wrote an article that reads Yoder along immanentist lines—and article, it should be noted, which Kerr actually depends on in part for his own reading of Yoder in his much-discussed and extremely innovative book.  So if there’s something wrong with immanence, why not put it in Yoderian terms, showing me the separation that I have not bridged?  Why try to disparage immanence by borrowing from an analogical perspective that our common Yoderian commitment opposes?  If this were to happen, it would at least force me to do something other than say:  please look again at what I have already written.

 

Lastly, I should say that I don’t understand Kerr’s claim that my appeal to “categories,” such as “immanence” or “fabulation,” are idolatrous because they are “being used to underwrite the adequacy of human action to the intended or desired ‘end’.”  This accusation needs some specificity, so that I know what my idolatrous “end” is—by the way, am I let off from idolatry if my “end” can’t “arrive”!—and so that I can understand how Kerr evades it.  If I am being accused of commitment to what Yoder criticizes as “effectiveness,” it would be helpful to know why exactly that is—just because I use the concept of “immanence”? 

 

But for me, immanence denotes a relation between cause and effect, God and world—again, this was something that was made quite clear at the beginning of my argument.  In short, immanence does not function for me as it does for Kerr.  Immanence, for Kerr, seems to name the world as it is cut off from God, such that a commitment to immanence is a denial of the divine (this is why Kerr sees the immanent realm as something that needs to be apocalyptically “invaded”).  But it is precisely the division between God and a realm of immanence, a division conceived by Kerr (why is his own conception not idolatrous?), that I do not accept, since for me what matters is the immanence of God and world.  I’d appreciate it if Kerr, on his way to labeling my thought here as idolatrous, would do me the favor of actually explaining what is not compelling about my position.  Instead, he just collapses immanence as I conceive it into immanence as he conceives it, which is idolatrous.

When one is called an idolater (especially when this happens in conjunction with one’s argument being basically ignored/misread), note what is happening:  there is no combat, there is only judgment.  What bothers me, then, is not that I’m being judged (that is more a problem for the one who needs to judge); what bothers me is that genuine combat is lacking.

Latest on Hicham Yezza: Sentenced to 9 months in Prison.

Commenter Andy covers all the points:

Latest news is that Hich has been jailed for 9 months. This is almost half the maximum sentence and almost unprecedented for this kind of “crime”.

He is convicted under the 1996 immigration act, focus of outrage when it was passed, under which virtually any genuine refugee is committing this same crime by entering the country illicitly or using deception (making it impossible for a refugee to enter Britain without committing a crime).

It was a wrongful conviction as no motive was established for Hich’s alleged lie and his entire line of action was inconsistent with someone trying to deceive (eg. when he found the lost passport he did not destroy it). The judge’s summing-up was misleading and the jury took only 10 minutes to reach a decision which seems to have been racially-motivated. It’s quite common here – when someone is subject to a “terror” raid, the state will seek to bring any charges they can, no matter how innocent the person is.

The old debate

The new issue of Political Theology is out, including a “round table” on Theology and the Political with articles by Dan Barber, Josh Davis, and me, and responses by Tony Baker, Nate Kerr, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein.