Belated Thoughts on Malick’s Tree of Life I: The Tension of an Allegory Wishing Not to Be

I saw Tree of Life back when I still lived in Nottingham. It was, in fact, the last movie I watched at Broadway Cinema, by far my favorite cinema in the world. I went knowing too much about the film already because of all the attention it had received, not just by the usual film critics I read but also by the theological blogosphere as well. And so I put off going to see the film in part because so many Christians had prostrated themselves in acts of piety that were only outdone in terms of awkward intersubjective embarrassment by their attempts to squeeze the movie into some pre-fabricated theological fan-fiction they feel they must repeat ad nauseum lest they fall into unbelief. Because of this I found that working up the energy to go see the film was harder than any other film I’ve gone to see.

In order to go I had to, and I’m not kidding, perform phenomenological exercises. I went under the epoche, bracketing what had become my natural attitude regarding the film. A natural attitude I can accurately describe as pure contempt (I love the French word for contempt, méprise, which I think actually, for those who can catch my citation here, bears on Tree of Life). So I went and I watched the film. I think I can even say that I watched it “so hard”. But I found after watching it that I couldn’t yet say anything about it. That would require more routing out of this natural attitude and coming to terms with what any actual critique could be beyond my contempt for the Christian theologians who had conspired – yes, it was a conspiracy! – to ruin this film for me. I think, after nearly three months of waiting I finally can express my thoughts on this film. I’m going to present this as a series of posts, which, for those who may be offended by some of my clearly polemical statements, is a witness to the seriousness with which I am giving this film. Some of these posts may deal more with the Christian theological reading of the film than the film itself, but those will be in part a defence of the movie against Christian theological overdetermination. For those who haven’t seen the film there is clearly going to be spoilers.

On Radical Orthodoxy’s Qutbism

A certain theoretical homology between Radical Orthodoxy and Qutbism hit me this evening while doing some background reading for the Speculative Medevialisms event. The connection was made while reading Bruce Holsinger’s chapter on Derrida’s medievalism in The Premodern Condition, which uses Catherine Pickstock’s polemic against Derrida in After Writing as a foil. It’s been awhile since I’ve read Pickstock, but Holsinger’s criticisms seem to me unassailable and crystallized some misgivings I had with Pickstock’s texts way back when about the flatness of her reading. But, that isn’t surprising since, after all, this was Holsinger’s goal. What is, well, perhaps not surprising, but interesting, was the structural similarity between Pickstock’s “utter lack of rhetorical modesty” (as Holsinger diagnoses her constant use of words like ‘only’, ‘optimum’, ‘alone’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’, and the like) and the same lack of rhetorical modesty in the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb.

Specimen Texts for Speculative Medievalisms

One of the interesting aspects of the upcoming Speculative Medievalisms conference is the use of “specimen texts” (presumebly this is why it the organizers are calling it an atelier). Some texts I’ll be using for my paper, “The Speculative Angel”, have been uploaded now. In addition to Thomas’ now standard angelology of purely spiritual beings and their basis in Pseudo-Dionysius, I’ve included a short text by the Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun and three selections, in draft translation, from French thinkers Henry Corbin, Guy Lardreau (with Christian Jambet), and Gilles Grelet. If you’re interested in contemporary forms of gnosticism operative in philosophical theory you may find those short translations of interest.

On Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity

One reads the first few pages of Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity with a kind of dawning horror: not only is this just the “method” volume rather than the thing itself, but the thing itself is going to total seven volumes (on Boehme, British and German Romanticism, Hegel, Schelling, 19th-century anti-Gnostic discourse, and 20th-century Gnostic and anti-Gnostic discourse) — many of which, he leads one to believe, are already largely drafted. Surely this is one of the most ambitious scholarly projects currently underway in theology today.

One also reads with a sense of profound relief, because it is clear that this is not going to be a moralizing discourse on Gnosticism of the Voeglin type. He rejects the notion that modernity as such is Gnostic, and he also rejects the common notion that Gnostic teachers are egomaniacs addicted to fame — in short, that the cause of Gnosticism is being a bad person.

Altizer on Philosophical Atheism and Gnosticim

Below is a recent of Thomas J.J. Altizer’s letters to friends. Here, in an engagement with some recent Roman Catholic studies of gnosticism and atheism, he touches on the relationship between contemporary philosophical atheism and the gnostic tradition. I am posting this here in hopes of stirring some discussion on the topic amongst AUFS readers.  – APS

Dear Friends,

I have long sensed that a most important and yet most elusive topic is philosophical atheism, being shocked that what I regard as the best books on it are largely ignored, so I would like to speak about two of these in this letter. First is God in Exile by Cornelius Fabro, Fabro is an Italian priest- scholar who is the primary translator of Kierkegaard into Italian, and who headed a Vatican commission on atheism. This book is a scholarly study of philosophical atheism from Descartes to the present, and there is assembled here a truly remarkable scholarly bibliography, and while Fabro is openly a Thomist, he has a genuine openness and depth in dealing with his subject. What I find most exciting in this book is its enactment of the actual history of philosophical atheism, apprehending it as a truly evolutionary movement, with each of its succeeding expressions known as an essential and necessary consequence of its predecessor, and with its inevitable culmination in Heidegger and theological atheism (yes, there is a brief section on The Gospel of Christian Atheism). Its beginning with Descartes is essential, and while Descartes is certainly not an atheist, Fabro can know the Cartesian Cogito as a purely autonomous reason, hence a revolutionary reason initiating for the first time in history a genuinely atheistic thinking.

Some Thoughts on the Politics of “Suburbs”

The place I grew up was not exactly the suburbs, more like some post-industrial small city out of a Springsteen song.  Nonetheless, there’s something about Arcade Fire’s new album that I find affectively striking.  This is because the titular “suburbs” are not an actual place—though, sadly, they are also that—but something like the condition of possibility for contemporary North American existence.   It is in this sense, I think, that we can speak of the political character of The Suburbs.  They have made an album that is not “realist” so much as an encounter with that which enables what we call reality—the feelings, the patterns of thought, the capacities of sense that one cannot avoid encountering.

The Gnosticism of Everyday Life

One of the most familiar types of “clever” remarks is to pretend to take it literally when someone says, “I’m sorry” in response to some tale of woe, responding, “It’s not your fault.” Indeed, so typical has this “joke” become among males my age that I am increasingly reluctant to express basic human sympathy out of fear of providing the set-up for some hackneyed joke.

Today, however, I came up with a solution that allows me to signal my empathy while gaining the upper hand in the increasingly competitive market for quips. Instead of simply saying, “I’m sorry,” one can respond to accounts of unfortunate events in which one had no hand as follows: “I apologize on behalf of God, who has so poorly fashioned the world.”

This quip works particularly well when dealing with people suffering from seasonal allergies or problematic wisdom teeth, which help to lend some credence to the Gnostic notion of Incompetent Design.

The Concept of “Reverse Gnosticism”

In the course of teaching on Gnosticism in several different classes, I once had the idea that Scientology was a kind of “reverse Gnosticism” — you have the secret knowledge, etc., but instead of identifying the foreign particles (in the case of classical Gnosticism, truly divine; in the case of Scientology, somehow coming from aliens) within oneself as the true self that must escape from the earth, you identify the foreign particles as a problem to be gotten rid of so that life on earth can procede smoothly. Something roughly parallel seems to be at work in the fringe “mass suicide” school of environmental thought — the transcendent element that distinguishes humanity from the rest of nature is not exalted as the highest and most wonderful thing, but is viewed as a dangerous disturbance that must be gotten rid of or at least minimized for the sake of the earth.

Looking for a more serious and mainstream example, one might also throw in the valorization of “the body” in various humanistic disciplines, reflecting the logic of Foucault’s famous quotation, itself a reversal of the logic that underwrote Gnosticism and so much of Hellenistic and Christian thought: “The soul is the prison of the body.”

Does this seem to be a useful concept? Can you think of other examples? What might be causing the emergence of “reverse Gnosticism”?

Fragments for a study of Gnosticism and Revolution

“In Gnosis the cosmos is seen as a world and an order devoid of meaning. [...] This is not just a piece of Gnostic eccentricity but part of the underlying sense of rebellion to be found in Gnosis, as well as in the radical pathos of revolution in general. This becomes apparent in a comparison with contemporary movements which claim for themselves signifier “left”, despite or because of the ominously negative ring of the word left in all languages. Obviously, it is not for external, coincidental reasons, such as the seating arrangement in parliament, that powerful contemporary movements choose to be called the “left”. Rather these movements affirm and embrace all that the world decries when it utters the word left, which has such an ominous ring about it. They engage with all the questions and afflictions which are left by the established order of the world; that is, they side with those who are cast out and despised.” – Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology pp.38-9.