Weaponized Apophaticism and the Question of Religion: Some Remarks on William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence

William T. Cavanaugh is well known in certain political theology (or “theopolitical” as some Christian theologians like to refer to it) circles because of his 1998 book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ. The book is a very interesting study of the Catholic Church in Chile during Pinochet’s regime and details the theological background to the political relationship between Church and State. At times, though I’m willing to hedge here, it isn’t clear in the book if Cavanaugh doesn’t secretly think that the Eucharist is a more revolutionary act than, say, workers organizing to provide for themselves and resist Pinochet’s Chicago School led neoliberalism. It certainly has been used in that way by some of Cavanaugh’s enthusiastic readers and even, dare I say, mis-used in that way by members of the Radical Orthodoxy/Red Tory movement. His mix of Foucault and Roman Catholic radicalism does give the impression of a strange conservative anti-Statist and anti-Capitalist form of thinking. Still, I would feel uncomfortable simply regulating Cavanaugh to this pit of vipers since his own work is overwhelmingly negative in its approach (I’ll explain the meaning of this more below) and his own attempts at positive proscriptive political statements often are undertaken with great care and a deep grounding in a tradition of non-violence.  Weirdly, if I can indulge in a bit of biography before moving on to the more substantive comments, reading Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist was the reason I decided not to convert to Roman Catholicism when at the age of 19 I decided to leave the Church of the Nazarene. Simply stated the book broke any romantic illusions I had about the Roman Church. It seemed to me as compromised and fucked up as anything American Evangelicalism had going for it. Regardless of the beauty of its liturgy or the depth of its intellectual tradition, I just couldn’t imagine ever converting. Perhaps if I grew up in a Roman Catholic culture I’d engage with it in some sense (and in fact I do), but why would I ask permission to be a part of something that had a hierarchy I’d struggle against for the rest of my life? And, worse yet, refused to acknowledge its awful crimes towards, not just others, but its own adherents? Perhaps not the outcome hoped for by Cavanaugh…

Nostalgia for quarrels

As I look back over the slightly more than four years that AUFS has been running, some of my fondest memories are the long-standing quarrels we have had. These quarrels are a reliable way to create fake drama to keep everyone entertained on a boring day, or simply to goose traffic stats. Despite our lingering reputation as a particularly quarrelsome bunch, however, I believe that our really long-standing quarrels have been fairly limited in number. To the best of my memory, these are the primary groups with or about whom we have had particularly heated debates here:

• The Radically Orthodox
• John Holbo (as a kind of after-effect of debates about Zizek that preexisted this blog)
• Object-Oriented Ontologists (including the affect-effects of debates with Levi Bryant prior to this blog’s founding and his turn toward OOO)
• Barthians
• Localists

It strikes me that most of these quarrels had their peaks months if not years ago and few of them seem likely to reignite any time soon. In particular, I feel as though I have nothing left to say about Radical Orthodoxy and intend to proceed with my theological work as though that school of thought simply did not exist — being publicly denounced by a movement’s founder will do that to you.

Am I missing any major ones, dear readers? Also, feel free to link to some of your favorite quarrelsome comment threads in comments.

A recommendation: Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz

I recently picked up a copy of this book more or less on a lark, my eye being drawn by the attractive French-style design of the new Verso “Radical Thinkers” series of which it is a part. In it, Gorz argues that the Marxian utopia of work is effectively impossible for two reasons. First, one of the primary goals of economic rationality is the progressive reduction in the amount of labor necessary for production. Second, the very nature of our present very complex mode of production means that even in the best case, economically productive work in the strict sense cannot provide the kind of holistic meaningfulness that Marx called for. That is to say, some degree of alienation from one’s work is inevitable, because even the most autonomous and cooperative working groups are working within a larger overarching enterprise whose goals they haven’t personally chosen.

In fact, Gorz believes that contemporary capitalism has effectively hijacked the Marxian utopia of work, creating a situation where an elite monopolizes all the full-time, dignified work, leaving everyone else in a precarious situation that often forces them to take on servile labor for that very elite. The decreasing need for labor power in economic production only ensures that this division will become more and more severe as time goes on. Meanwhile, trade unions primarily serve to preserve the labor of a full-time elite without being able to address the problem of precarious labor.

Gorz’s solution to this is that we need to find a way to actually benefit from this decrease in the need for productive labor, namely by embracing the increase in free time that is its correlative.

Birtherism: Questions remain

I apologize for even mentioning birtherism in this context, but hopefully this can start an informative discussion of some kind. My question about birtherism, on a practical level, is as follows: even if it were true that Obama does not meet the constitutional citizenship requirement for the presidency, what remedy is there? Who decides that he needs to be removed from office, how is that decision enforced, and what happens to all the laws and executive orders he signed?

My theory is that there is essentially nothing to be done, just as there was nothing to be done when Bush stole the 2000 election.

A Kind-of Follow-Up Post Re: Investments

I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a couple of months, but kept putting it off until yesterday when I was engaged in an off-blog conversation about the engaging/frustrating/etc. comment thread accompanying Adam’s finance/retirement thread. There was an interesting dynamic at work in it and other similarly themed threads here and abroad in which there was a palpable defensiveness from the word go alongside a striking propensity to interpret even self-deprecation as rhetorically aggressive behavior. I don’t say that as a chastising administrator. I mention it now merely to flag the motivation for my remembrance of a post from HTMLGIANT a couple of months ago that I intended to mention then but didn’t. I waited so long, in fact, that for some reason the entire post has since been deleted–presumably, given the subject, the comment thread became malignant and had to be removed from the blog entirely, lest it take down the entire enterprise. Thank heavens for Google Reader! (The post in question was in reaction to the comment thread here, which is probably worth clicking if the following paragraph makes no sense to you.)

For the record: Some inaccuracies in §22 of The Pale King

§22 is one of the most powerful sections of The Pale King, providing an account of the narrator’s conversion from a listless burnout to a dedicated IRS agent. Crucial to this process is his accidental attendance of a review session for an advanced tax class, where the professor gives a lecture about the heroic nature of the accounting profession that has been much-quoted in reviews. The purpose of this post is to point out something that bothered me consistently about this chapter, namely its frequent inaccuracies in its references to Chicago. Whether these inaccuracies are DFW’s or the narrator’s (i.e., purposeful) is not completely clear to me, but I am inclined to think they are purposeful and will explain why after listing the primary inaccuracies I found.

Medicalization and ideology

I’m often struck by how deeply affected our common discourse has been by the language psychology. Nowhere is this clearer than in the absolutely pervasive use of the term “depressed” to refer to virtually any negative emotional state. One rarely hears the word “sad” anymore — everything that was previously “sad” is now “depressing.”

What changes with the shift to “depressing”?

Presentation: “Agamben, Paul, and the Oath”

This afternoon, I was invited by my friend Virgil (Bill) Brower to give a presentation at Northwestern under the auspices of the Paul of Tarsus Reading Group. The topic is Agamben’s engagement with Paul in The Sacrament of Language, and you can read the text of my presentation here (PDF).

An announcement

I have accepted a position at Shimer College, a small Great Books school in Chicago. The position is tenure-track equivalent, and I will be teaching broadly in the humanities and social science areas of their core curriculum. I am very excited to be joining Shimer’s unique program, which I feel will be a good fit for my interdisciplinary approach and my pedagogical focus on primary texts — and I am of course relieved to have found a permanent position at all in such a terrible job market. The fact that it’s located where I actually want to live feels near-miraculous.

That I even applied was a stroke of luck — I had not seen the job listing until it was e-mailed to me by Noah Kippley-Ogman, a Shimer alum and a long-time lurker. My position at Kalamazoo came up under similarly serendipitous circumstances, as did its extension from one to two years, and so in many respects I consider myself one of the most fortunate young academics around, particularly in light of the fact that my first round of applications went out literally just as a world-historical financial crisis was getting underway.

While the process was difficult and exhausting and while this year in particular included a number of heart-breaking near-misses, I have come out better than most: I’ve never taught on an adjunct basis, I’ve always had a reasonable teaching load and will continue to, and I’ve been continually employed full-time with benefits basically since graduating (except for the present gap between my contracts at Kalamazoo and Shimer). I still believe that there’s no reason that my path has to represent such a fortunate exception, but the fact remains that it has been — and I’m grateful for that.

Thoughts on the purpose of education

One increasingly hears that the purpose of education is to increase one’s earning power. There are many obvious objections to this claim, both practical and principled. Yet I do believe that the desire to become educated in order to increase one’s earning power does point toward a genuine goal of education: namely, to enrich your life.

What’s more, the necessity of displacing this false goal of education itself encapsulates the educational task as a whole: to broaden one’s scope of enjoyment. Obviously having money increases one’s scope for enjoyment, and obviously being poor sucks. Yet life can suck in a lot more ways — life can be boring, or unfulfilling, or lonely, or meaningless.

A person who is more genuinely educated has more resources for making life suck less in a general sense.