More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§7-12

§7. Agamben refers back to the section of Homo Sacer I mentioned last time, where he critiques theoreticians of religion, and he continues that critique here, characterizing the notion of the “sacred” based on the concept of mana as a “scientific mytholegeme.” Theorists found a concept similar to mana in many “primitive” societies and came to believe that it named some kind of invisible force that it central to religious experience. This concept has even shaped the work of one of Agamben’s favorites, namely Benveniste. But everyone should’ve known better because in 1950 Levi-Strauss critiqued the religious interpretation of mana, saying that it is nothing more complex or mysterious than a word to designate something whose precise nature has not yet become clear, like the x of algebra. For Levi-Strauss, therefore, the only mysterious force associated with mana is its bizarre influence over the scholarly community. Agamben proposes that scholars are projecting their own lack of understanding of any religion, including that of their own culture, into the data of “primitive” cultures.

More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§1-6

Last summer I produced a series of reading notes over Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria, a text that is still unavailable in English as of this writing. Since then, a follow-up volume has come to my attention. Designated as Homo sacer II, 3, it is entitled Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archealogia del giuarmento (The Sacrament of Language: Archeaology of the Oath). The book itself is constructed as a long essay, with 29 numbered sections adding up to just under 100 pages — more on the scale of State of Exception than Homo Sacer or Il Regno. I currently plan to divide the notes into five installments, pausing to summarize when I get through 5 or 6 sections. This first post will cover the first six sections, as indicated in the title. (It will likely seem much less substantial than my previous summaries, but that’s because of the short pagecount combined with larger type.)

End of the University?

While I’m not as convinced as Mark C. Taylor that the university system as a whole is structurally flawed — I’m more inclined, perhaps naively, to think that the biggest problems stem from inadequate funding — I appreciate his taking up the cause of cross-disciplinarity in the New York Times.  I’ll save a lot of my reflections on this for my own “narrative CV,” but needless to say (for those who know me & my work), that kind of thing is where my heart lies as well. Hard to see how exactly it would save the university, though.

Narrative CV: Adam Kotsko

Since I defended my dissertation, I have begun thinking that it would be helpful to me to try to take stock of what brought me to this point — what influences and convictions have come together in my work — in the form of a “narrative CV.” I’ve invited the other main-page bloggers of AUFS to contribute their own, and I hold out some hope that it might inspire those beyond this blog to write up a similar reflection.

Genuine befuddlement

Milbank has recently taken to claiming that there is something fascist about disconnecting sex and reproduction. See this quasi-interview, for example:

The groups mentioned may not want to shake Milbank’s hand: he opposes gay marriage (“I don’t want to get into the situation where we deny there is something special about being attracted to the opposite sex”).

He says he is concerned about working-class women being left to raise children alone, “in part – alongside economic factors – because of the collapse of the male ethos of supporting the woman”, and has written most stridently in opposition to in vitro fertilisation treatment for single women.

“By supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the Left is really supporting a new mode of fascism,” Milbank says.

My question is a simple one: what on earth is he talking about? Is “a new mode” doing all the work here, meaning that he gets to define it out of the air, or is there something else going on?

The fantasy of “quasi-Catholicism”

Regular readers will be familiar with quasi-Catholicism, a term coined by Anthony to describe the phenomenon of theologically educated Christians who deeply admire the Roman Catholic Church and even ascribe it a certain degree of practical authority, yet do not actually become Roman Catholic. In milieux such as Anglican or Lutheran confessions, such a stance is perhaps understandable as a kind of drive toward unity that recognizes we’re not quite there yet, but in more evangelical settings, it is arguably much more strange. After all, most evangelical groups have tended to have a deep suspicion of the RCC and are generally very congregational in practice if not in explicit polity — reflecting a more “democratic” ethos that distrusts hierarchical authority and intellectual elites.

Yet it is precisely this last aspect that may explain why intellectually-oriented evangelicals are attracted to Roman Catholicism (and here I would claim some personal insight, as I was at one time an intellectually-oriented evangelical and actually converted to Roman Catholicism, albeit without the intermediation of academic “quasi-Catholic” discourse). Think of how the RCC appears to someone in an anti-intellectual evangelical setting — a place where there is a clear line of authority, where theology has a chance of becoming enforcible doctrine, where education in general is highly valued and intellectual authorities have a great deal of day-to-day power, where ministers must go through a rigorous program of study and formation rather than relying on personal charisma, etc. This is somewhere they could feel welcome, finally! What’s more, this is somewhere that people like them are in charge, rather than being a marginalized and distrusted element. Surely, this is how things should be, this is what “the church” that is “really the church” looks like!

Why not become Roman Catholic, then? Well, frankly, there is a lot of “weird shit” going on in actual existing Roman Catholicism, especially from the perspective of evangelicals — devotion to Mary and the saints, folksy practices that appear to be both “unbiblical” and “superstitious,” etc. The irony here is great, since the power of the binding authority that evangelical quasi-Catholics so badly want to exist has been established in the modern era precisely in relationship to the Marian doctrines that an evangelical cannot accept. So the RCC becomes a kind of fantasy-object, a model for the idealized evangelical version of “the church” that the quasi-Catholic intellectual would create and enforce if given half the chance.

Now I realize that I’ll get some defensive comments here, so I want to be clear that I’m talking about gut-level appeal rather than conscious belief. Obviously intellectually-oriented people are very good at coming up with compelling intellectual reasons for what they’re doing. But given that it’s young adults who tend to become “quasi-Catholic,” it doesn’t seem implausible or offensive to me to think that there is more going on here than objective assessment of the theological data. This gut-level appeal may also explain why “the church” is such a third rail among theology bloggers — what one is challenging in critiquing the fashionable strong ecclesiology is not an actual existing institution or a “regulative ideal” to which that institution should aspire, but the quasi-Catholic intellectuals’ fantasy of their own power and authority.

More on Theology and Philosophy, Politics, New Books, and a Picture of Academic Rock Stars: Another Link Post

Though not directly related to the continuing discussion below, Dave Belcher has posted an incredibly interesting post on the theology of David Bentley Hart over at La Perruque. Dave tackles head-on the reigning (at least among young theological bloggers) theological deference to Hart and provides a theological rebuttal to Hart’s violent theological conclusion to Western nihilism. This conclusion, that Hart’s theology is ultimately a kind of Satanic Hegelianism, is argued for with real wit and intelligence. I can’t help but highlight my favorite paragraph:

This narrative of world history is quite simply Hegelian: the church (or, better, Christendom) by Hart’s lights persists through the destruction of its enemies, and alongside and over against that nothingness it summons from the past. His is a dark vision in which Christendom persists, in the aftermath, as the very mediation of that nothingness. With no paganism left to slay, Hart would have the church now subsist on its rotting corpse. There is a fierce horror erupting here, appropriate for the Schmittian animus of which it partakes. This nothingness that is the residue of the ancient world – this is the true (unknown, but anticipated) enemy of Christendom precisely because it tells Hart who the church is. As he would have it, the church’s very relation to the nothingness, anticipated and disclosed by Christendom, simply is the church in the present.

Also of interest is Alex’s recent post on the London Climate Camp. Alex is saying some important things concerning the role of protest. Writing against a certain tendency to put down actually-existing political action in favour or locating both the reality of protest and how it can be pushed to a higher intensity, Alex provides some interesting things to think about as well as a real challenge to the misguided nihilistic urge to return to a Soviet-era model of Leftist/Communist politics.

Finally, the new book series by Zero Books (featuring the best and brightest of the London Dark Philosophy Club), is being launched in London this week.

Oh, and this is fucking hilarious. Whether you love it or hate it, you can’t say that the Spec Realism guys don’t have a sense of humor.

Is God also dead in America?

In the comments to Anthony’s recent post on theology and philosophy, we began discussing “the death of God” toward the end of the thread and I mentioned that I thought the death of God was operative in America as well, albeit in a different way than in the European context in terms of which what one might call the “classical” concept of the death of God took form. What follows is not the full-blown argument I had imagined I would be able to make, but rather a handful of fragmentary remarks that point toward what I think an answer to my title question might look like.

First: for the purposes of this discussion, let us postulate that we are only talking about something like “modernity.”

Writing Twice

A frequent problem I’ve run into while working on my PhD dissertation has been serious issues with the way I formulate and present my ideas. Part of this is the fault of the way that PhD’s are done in the UK. To get funding you have to come up with some kind of vague notion of what you want to spend the next three years doing about two-thirds into your MA. That vague notion that comes to haunt you for the next three years as you struggle to give it real content and if you change your mind about your topic, as often happens, you have to somehow make your new topic fit into the old one. This leads to a lot of quick and dirty PhDs being churned out in the UK that don’t get the same benefit of slow simmering that US PhDs do (though US PhDs have their own problems I am sure).

Part of the problem, however, is with the way I write. My adviser recommended I essentially try and “write twice”. What he meant by this is that I should write on whatever interests me and only after doing so will I finally figure out what it is that is necessary to say to push my argument along. As it is often an intelligent move to listen to your adviser I decided to take his advice, but I found there was a strange psychological block on writing twice on my computer. So I went out and bought some nice notebooks; yes, they had to be nice so that I could break another psychological block that I have when it comes to writing out notes. For whatever reason if the notebook is aesthetically pleasing, with nice, comfortable lines to write between I can treat it as something that must be written in with serious writing. I have found that writing all of this out long hand has resulted in something less dramatic than the original idea of writing twice, which implied I would almost have to write everything from scratch again. By writing everything in the notebook the argument emerges more clearly and with better overall presentation and then when I type it up into a word file I’m able to make more interesting edits or add things that are missing here and there, all while preserving a much more coherent flow than was found in the documents I was drafting on computer alone.

Today I figured out why it was that writing this current chapter out by hand was going faster than writing it on computer. Essentially I am able to follow my outlines more by writing by hand first. When I used to write my first draft on the computer I would try and “save time” by making sure I inserted the appropriate footnotes as necessary, but I would also get distracted making references in footnotes to things that did need to be addressed but by addressing at that very moment derailed the writing of the main body. I would become obsessed with tracking down the right references that very second and by the time I finished typing up the footnote the focus of the writing would be lost. In short, by writing on the computer I was letting the footnotes determine the flow of the paper, which is clearly insane. Writing in the notebook is really no different than making the decision not to deal with the footnotes until later, but somehow it is much easier to actually do this by moving from notebook to computer. With the notebook I am able to short-circuit dealing with my neuroses or dealing with the temptation to repeat my mistakes. Plus, when I’m famous and there are students working in Smithian studies, they can pour through my “Red notebooks” and “Blue notebooks” for textual variants.

Christ and Culture: A Cautionary Example

I’m worried about our colleague Ben Myers, as his latest post strikes me as frankly insane — but maybe the problem is on my end, because the emerging consensus is that it’s great and helpful.