In reality, however, it seems that many of our conventions are not only dumb in themselves, but superfluous. For instance, take the use of the apostrophe to designate either possessives or contractions. It seems to me that these apostrophes do not actually add any information that is not already supplied naturally by the context — if you left out all apostrophes, you could still tell which words were contractions (as opposed to homographs like “wont” and “cant,” which are rare to begin with) and, even more radically, I contend that you could tell whether it was a plural, a possessive, or a plural possessive.

To demonstrate this bold claim, I challenge our readers to come up with a sentence that is (a) somewhat plausible and (b) could be genuinely ambiguous if plurals/possessives were not distinguished using apostrophes.

By now, it’s practically required by law to compare Iyer’s work to Beckett and Bernhard, and while those comparisons are surely accurate, there is also something new and intriguing in Iyer’s framing. Lars is a first-person narrator who almost never gets to speak for himself — he is primarily occupied with reporting W.’s alternating self-loathing and Lars-loathing, in a strange mix of free indirect discourse and direct quotation. The result is a strangely co-narrated novel, one that seems to grow directly out of the dysfunctional dynamic of the friendship, which — perhaps like the damp — takes on a life of its own beyond the control of either partner. Unexpectedly, however, the result of this claustrophobic framing is that the despair is always leavened by a certain hope or even sincerity.

Dogma extends and exacerbates this dynamic while adding something that is mostly absent from Spurious: namely, actual events. Lars and W. go to America, for example, they develop their own ascetic philosophy of writing based on Dogme 95 (the inspiration for the title), and a tragedy befalls W. This greater range of action naturally produces a greater range of topics for W.’s analysis — in addition to commenting on Rosenzweig, Cohen, and Bela Tarr, he now holds forth on downtown Nashville (made up entirely of car parks), on the disturbing effect of America’s low clothing prices, on the process of trying and failing to give up a mean addiction to Civilization 4. The result is a work that is funnier and ultimately more appealling than Spurious, one that I hope will hook even more people into Iyer’s fractured vision.

We all know the story of Noah’s Ark:  it is one of the most imaginative literary stories in the Bible—with a big boat, animals, strange weather, and a great flood.  We teach it to our children because of the vivid images of the story; in fact, one of our most popular toys for children in our church is the Little People Noah’s Ark. 

We very often forget the violence of the story.  Everyone in the world dies except for just a few people, and all but two of each species survive.  The stage of the story is set that people are sinning—and it’s worth noting that this story represents the introduction of the word “sin” in the Hebrew Bible—by focusing their attention away from God and copying each other’s behavior.  You know how it works with children, when one person starts misbehaving, the others begin to misbehave.  And over time what was once considered misbehavior is now considered acceptable behavior. 

Our church isn’t like this [ahem!], but if you’ve ever been in a church where people are very strict about dress codes, people start talking about nostalgia for the past, when people dressed nicer to come to church.  And then they get mad that those children have had children, and those kids dress worse when they come to church!  As it happens, I know young adults who have left churches because they were told to dress nicer when they were coming to church from work or going to work.  I think you understand what I’m talking about here.

So if you’ve ever been to a church where you’ve had a scowl because you didn’t dress a certain way, or if you brought the wrong version of the Bible, or you tied your shoes a little differently or whatever the case may be, you get a clear sense that you’re not on the ark.  But the way you are treated at a church might disclose an understanding of a different kind of God at work in the community:  one that is looking for your mistakes or a God who is forgiving and full of grace.

So, when looking at the story of Noah’s ark, we can easily get the impression that there are two different kinds of Gods at work here:  the God of the Flood and the God of the Rainbow.  The God of the Flood wants vengeance, and his answer to the sin and violence of the world is to respond with nearly ultimate and utterly unthinkable violence.  But the God of the Rainbow is one of promise, a God of second and third chances, and a God who freely offers grace.  Floods are violent, destructive, and nasty, and this image of God is all of these things; and rainbows are pretty, surprising, colorful and accepting.  And the Rainbow God here appears to be ready and willing to be liberal with his offering of grace to the world from this point forward.

With these two very different images of God, or even two Gods at work altogether, we must understand that the greatest sin of God’s people has always been idolatry:  the creation of false Gods.  But we must also understand that the Christian belief is that that Christ offers us the ability to emerge out of this idolatry into a way of living that subverts and reverses sin and violence.

At the same time, though, much of Christian history has been wrapped up in the idea of power.  This is clearly part of our everyday understanding and tension of being a Christian in our contemporary world.  Two of the biggest stories of the past two weeks in the news involve the President’s administration dictating to religious organizations that they cannot enforce their own religious doctrine on employees who are not employed in a religious capacity.  You have probably heard the outcry from Catholics over this in particular—the Catholic Bishops are so upset about this that they issued a statement to be read in every church in the country in protest of what the President’s policies are stating.

And you have probably heard about the presidential candidate saying that the sitting President has a “phony theology.”  When pressed to explain what he meant by this statement, he issued a statement that he meant “ideology” and not “theology,” but in context, the issue at stake is where and how power is delineated from God in the world.  It makes a lot of sense that a Catholic sees power as descending from a hierarchy, and a UCC Protestant understanding the power of God from the bottom up.

My point today in this sermon is not to argue that one side is right and one side is wrong, but we see two very different kinds of God working in the two most potent stories in our news in the last two weeks:  one where God rules from on high and rules in a trickle-down fashion, and another where God works from among the people to hold those with power above them accountable to the God of the bottom-feeders of society.  The problem here is that when we wrap religion with politics, too often power itself becomes the idol, and the image of God becomes an afterthought.

So it would seem that the “God” of one side of the power debate will look very different from the “God” of the other side.  What is happening here is what so often happens:  we are creating God in our own image, with our own agendas.

I was once in a small discipleship group and one young man was really struggling with a moral issue.  It was clear as day that the moral question he had was clearly unethical and, as we defined in our small group, as sinful—but what he wanted was what he wanted.  He came to us after Spring Break and decided that after much prayer, that God did not want him to suffer with the questions we were helping him with and he went ahead and did what he was going to do.  When we talked about it, he acted as if he had discovered something in secret that God very specifically spoke to him in a way that gave him an exception to a very basic moral question of the Christian faith because he was faithful and because he had suffered enough.

The more we talked the more it was clear that this new God that had emerged was his own creation—and if we create Gods in our own image, of course they’re going to side with whatever we happen to want in any given moment.  And, of course, when he lost his job for what he had done a while later, he blamed his employer for not being Christian enough to understand that he had a very special relationship with God that was more important than acting under the same rules to which the rest of society subscribes.

So, from the vantage point of history, God looks like a vengeful God, a mean God, a terrible God, in sending the flood.  And from our vantage point, the God of the rainbow sounds like a bleeding heart.  But some of this depends on which side of God you fall, whether we like the graceful or violent God depends on the image that we construct of God out of ourselves and our interests.  And, it would seem, the story of Noah and the ark is a dangling carrot, a temptation, for us to descend into an argument for one or the other.  When the answer is really neither.

With this quandary we now enter this season of Lent: these 40 days or so where we attempt to shed the skins of these idolatries, and these false images of God, and grow closer to the God disclosed in and through Jesus.  The God we attempt to discover must involve the dissolving of the self—ourselves—and must involve an immersion—a full immersion—into Christ and our own baptismal covenants.  We know that the violence of the world has continued and that the world has become, and is always becoming a more morally questionable place—and that our religious institutions and our religious “figures” themselves contribute to the nihilism of the present.  But the God in Christ we seek offers a way out of this cycle of violence, an escape that our forebears have never truly realized.

So our challenge now, as we stand on this first Sunday of Lent, with the expectation of the Return of Christ upon us, is to engage the sinfulness of the world, a sinfulness in which we also participate, and to live out our baptism covenants as a flood that negates and reverses the course of ourselves and the course of the world around us.  From this we are to finally live for nothing more fervently than a world where everyone can know the God of the rainbow as a God of covenants through the waters of baptismal reversal. 

That we work for the Kingdom in this world now, but that Kingdom building is more than grace, but a total subversion of principalities, powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places.  That this God is the God of the oppressed and the God of the materially blessed together, because both need the repentance and salvation that Christ alone and uniquely offers.  And that our attainment of the faith is not a once-and-done event, but a process of mission of making this world a better place, not for ourselves, but for the world at large that desperately needs Christ. 

None of this can happen until the Church repents that it has failed to never live up to an actual act of building the Kingdom for everyone.  The world will simply continue the eternal recurrence of violence and deadtime until we realize that God’s time is newly Now.  Now is the time, and this is the place to commit not only once again to the ministry of Christ, but to the New Creation Now Occurring and available through our Eucharistic table.  Will the taste of bread and wine now invite us into complacency and an elaborate pat on the back, or will be recommit our baptism as an act of drowning of the old to bring in a truly and absolutely New?  Or is the pinnacle of our Christian experience stuck in the past, as an argument about the historical truths of the faith or entrenched in the backwardness of the present, as an argument about preferences of music, or an argument about dress codes in the church?  Which paths lead us into a future faith?

I haven’t followed all the debates surrounding these revelations, but it seems clear to me that Schwyzer is continuing in the pattern of his abusive behavior — in this case, he’s abusing feminism for the sake of his own personal redemption. We wouldn’t want someone who’d been part of a lynch mob making speeches at a civil rights rally, nor would we want a former guard at Auschwitz spearheading a charity for Holocaust survivors. I’d say that the sexual exploitation of students and the attempted murder of a domestic partner are similar disqualifiers.

In a sense, there’s nothing more to say — there are some things you do, and you don’t come back from. Whatever redemption you find has to be a private affair. For Schwyzer to expect women to trust him — and more, to expect them to trust him to speak on their behalf — is appalling.

Yet there are women who are defending Schwyzer’s right to be identified as a feminist. As a male feminist myself (or a feminist ally, if anyone out there objects to a man identifying directly with feminism), I can say that in my experience, there is a real hunger for male allies among young feminists. That is certainly understandable on the level of principle, given that feminism is, in the last analysis, about changing society for the better for everyone — and it’s also understandable on the level of strategy, because male privilege, while illegitimate in itself, is a useful thing to have on your side.

What I think that the example of Schwyzer shows, though, is that suspicion is very much still warranted. Already in the 1970s, Ruether was warning of the tendency of male allies to attempt to “take over” — and Schwyzer is a particularly unsavory example of that, hijacking the feminist movement in the service of his own attempt to erase his history of abuse. If he really cared about women, the first thing he would do is leave them alone. If he really felt moved to get involved with women’s issues, he should have put himself in a position of submission, allowing women to direct his energies to where they found it most useful. Imposing oneself on women in order to enact your own personal redemption narrative is just a continuation of the same basic pattern of behavior that you need to be redeemed from.

The standards for any man to become a leader or public figure for feminism must necessarily be stringent, and the men themselves need to have the kind of vulnerability and openness necessary to question their own motives and to take criticism seriously. Very few men are seriously prepared to accept that kind of accountability — indeed, I would hesitate to claim that for myself, as I’ve never really been put to the test in any serious way — and that is one sign that feminism is still urgently necessary.

Thus, while I understand that there are good reasons for women to be open to male allies, I would recommend that their first reaction be to ask, “Oh shit, what’s this guy’s agenda?”

First, I have to point out that I feel I can only write this in a public forum now that I have a relatively safe position with a contract for full-time academic labor. This already implies a deeper problem, where in a very difficult academic job market, the potential labor force is unable to speak up about the very problems affecting them (though, of course, this isn’t limited just to academia), since the process is so mystifying in the first place the main goal is always simply to not actively “screw oneself”.

The problem of internal hires seems to me to follow a basic pattern. Often times a person is hired provisionally on a two-year or whatever visiting contract. This may be done simply because a secure funding line is not yet in place, and then at some point the department is able to secure that funding line. They then have go through the process of pretending that this person they hired, and who is often doing a good job in that position, isn’t necessarily who they want. Sometimes that is probably the case! Maybe two years prior to securing funding they thought they really needed someone to do environmental ethics and then later on they decide the department is really lacking, I don’t know, a Kantian or something. In such situations, heart-breaking as they undoubtedly are for the two-year hire, it makes sense to do a full search. But what seems to happen is normally the new funding line is going to secure someone who is teaching in the general area that the two-year visiting position also filled. And so of course the internal candidate, who already proved themselves able to do the job, is going to be one of the top candidates. He or she has literally already gone through this hiring process and moreover have apparently been carrying out a two-year interview and teaching presentation! What does this all mean? Simply that there is no real need to carry out a full search.

Yet, the endemic middle class ethos of academia keeps these departments from being honest. With the desire to feel that they, the department and university, have done the “right thing” they end up acting immorally. Simply because they then go on to advertise this position (often times nearly writing up the CV of the internal candidate) and go on to receive hundreds and hundreds of application packets from academic job-seekers. Now this part of the process seems unavoidable, even if departments and universities were to respond to my plea for honesty (unlikely as it may seem), it seems worth their time to consider other applicants in addition to their current internal candidate. But what they go on to do is completely immoral. For part of their full-search is holding first-round interviews, usually at a major conference of the discipline. And that means requiring 25 to 50 people to spend money on flights and hotels to come for their dehumanizing 20-60 minute interview. To add insult to injury these job-seekers, many of whom are eking out a living adjuncting, sometimes making less than $25,000/year, are being required to pay the highest possible price for their flights because the departments and universities decide usually one-to-two weeks before these first-round interviews who they will be interviewing. Flights are not cheap two weeks before you’re supposed to fly! I am speaking in part from experience here. I won’t name the school, but it was the only philosophy department to give me a first-round interview and not only did the flight cost me just under $400, but they also asked me to provide them with three newly created syllabi. All for a position with an internal candidate who by all accounts does excellent work and who perfectly matches their job ad.

It seems that in the interests of securing their own freedom from guilt, these tenured and tenure-track individuals end up committing a moral evil against their untenured and job-seeking colleagues. So what do I propose? Well, a little honesty. We all know that these internal candidates exist and we should recognize that they’ve already been vetted by a process. Departments should simply hold a selective search, essentially skipping past the first-stage altogether so as to avoid forcing economically struggling adjuncts and visiting professors to shoulder an economic burden that offers them very little payoff. Look through the applicant pool and pick two or three candidates to bring for an on-campus interview at the expensive of the school (what normally happens in the second or sometimes third-round depending on the practice of the university). What you’re basically looking to do is give the department a fail-safe. You basically know who you want (the internal candidate), but it may be that someone out there will do a markedly better job and checking on that is fine. But not when it causes direct anguish for 25-50 “at-risk academics”.

On one level, I want to reject this notion that theology is the sine-qua-non of AUFS. In my mind, we deal broadly with the humanities. If one were to do a Venn diagram of all our front-page contributors, I’d think that continental philosophy would actually be the biggest circle. In addition, we obviously do a lot with literature, including reading groups over novels, as well as with film and pop culture. It is by no means the case that we always or even often deal with such issues through a theological lens.

I do admittedly post on theology fairly often, since it’s my primary area of research, and I am admittedly the dominant poster here — yet I’d like to think that the fact that we’re regarded as arguably the leading theology blog has more to do with the mediocrity of the field of theology blogging than with our monomaniacal focus on theology. And I expect that as I continue in my new-found career as professor of humanities, I will post proportionately less on theology than on the other fields I teach in (and will presumably wind up doing research and writing in as well).

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that in the American academic context, theology is a radioactive discipline. Where Europeans are now able to view theology primarily as a part of their cultural heritage, American political debates don’t allow that kind of benign neutrality toward the Christian tradition. I have been accused multiple times of carrying water for fundamentalists simply by the fact of being involved with theology. In addition, for those from a secular background, there’s a tendency to view religion as inherently incomprehensible or irrational — such that lacking knowledge of theology is somehow different from lacking knowledge of Deleuze, for example, a more insuperable obstacle. (The fact that many contemporary theologians go out of their way to claim that only insiders can really understand doesn’t help matters.)

Something akin to the “one-drop rule” seems to be at work here: taking theology seriously at all means that we are all about theology, or at least always implicitly about theology. Hence those from outside theology are uncomfortable directly participating. On the other side, those from within theology are particularly attracted to a venue where theology is taken seriously, so that the majority of our commenters tend to be “theology people” — reinforcing the dynamic.

I’ve long said that AUFS is whatever its participants make of it, but it somehow seems that no matter how much we post about literature, or ecology, or continental philosophy, we’re never strongly identified as a blog that deals with those things. Is there any way to break this pattern? (This would be a good time for lurkers to de-lurk.)

Now that Santorum is surging again, I am beginning to wonder if Santorum and his appeal is more than a figure for whom one might vote as a referendum against Mormonism.

Driving around doing pastoral work today, on President’s Day, I listened to right-wing radio talk about Santorum exposing the “left’s assault on religion,” evidenced by, on Rush Limbaugh’s show,  at least an hour of airtime ridiculing how Forbes magazine covered Whitney Houston’s funeral.

And then this struck me.  It’s no secret, and shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone, that Santorum isn’t exactly Catholic in a mainstream sense of being Catholic.  Santorum’s Catholicism is more convenient than it is orthodox, but it’s probably fair to say that the truly orthodox Catholics don’t have a problem with Santorum’s deviations from Catholicism, so long as he remains pro-life. His conservatism is more self-perception, a self-perception that is convincing to many of his target audience, at least based on his voting record. And Santorum’s appeal isn’t to the wealthy elite in the same way that Romney and Obama are haindmaidens of corporate interests–though Santorum has shown a willingness to be this kind of puppet if really allowed.

So what is the appeal of Santorum beyond a very small group of voters? I suggest that it is any or all of the following:  his political tenuousness, his oppressed-millionaire personae, his as-a-dad-I-only-wear-a-tie-to-church dress code, his Bill-Murray-hairline, his I-had-to-put-up-with-a-lying-non-Christian in the workplace (Arlen Specter), his sense of being a subversive heterosexual, and his sense of entitlements–to the point of portraying himself as a loving father who will let his own career to be interrupted by using legal loopholes to ensure his children are educated the way he wants at the taxpayers’ expense.  All of these speak to the strange social location of the white, heterosexual taxpayer in America today, a population clearly in search of some definition in 2012.

Santorum’s speaking is directed at defining this group of people–and the women who love/sleep with them, and the children who see their values challenged by all those who are “other.” Yes, Santorum is a power untapped that has yet to realize its full potential. Santorum’s Catholicism is part of a larger social scheme that seeks to blur the lines between oldline Protestants and old-school Catholics, thereby continuing the racial erasure of “natives,” “immigrants.” Protestants will tolerate his birth control business because they’re afraid that the government will enforce the hiring of a gay janitor in their empty churches. Catholics will tolerate his own condemnation of the Church—his language on the Sean Hannity Show a few weeks ago was precisely that he “condemns” the Church for its social justice stances—as a Mimi Alford-less Catholic presidential figure who diverts attention away from the Church’s current Roman Missal Crisis as a Fourth-Degree Knight assaulting modernity. 

At bottom, Santorum embodies the ambiguities and tensions of “whiteness,” and his appeal and language underscores the true perceived enemy of whiteness, namely the so-called “food stamp president,” whose racial hybridity is perceived by Gingrich and Santorum as too universal and dangerous to continue in power.

Dying For Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
A lecture by Martin Hägglund
Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows

Tuesday, 2/21, 4:30 p.m.
Stuart 102
Reception to follow

In the “Broader Questions” post, one of the issues that came up was the relation of this book to theology, and I suppose I can begin by talking about why I want to resist any “theologization” of my argument. The book, as I see it, is not primarily theological. Let’s say instead that the book is about religion.

Religion seems to function, today, as a strange coefficient that can be multiplied through other discourses without ever being thought of as in-itself. Or, when it is thought of in-itself, rarely addressed is its implication in, or even constitution of and by, these discourses. My book, as I see it, is trying to deal with this problematic. Why is this the case? And what would happen if we did address religion in such a way? We do need to deal with this problematic, but one the problematic is shown, what then? Should we keep religion? And if we don’t keep it, do we have to get rid of everything else with which it is co-implicated?

So, for instance, we have philosophy as it intersects with religion in Chapter 1. Or at least as it intersects with the question of God. What I’ve tried to do there, I hope is clear, is nothing like “philosophy of religion,” rather I’ve sought to get beneath these discourses and to trouble the very notion that one could separate these discourses (philosophy and religion, or philosophy and speech of/about God) in the first place. The pretense of separation between philosophy and theology (speech of/about God) is a way of avoiding the question of religion.

This emphasis on the “avoidance” of the question of religion might be a useful one to think about, in the wake of the book event, which has tended to focus on philosophical or theological issues. By avoidance, let me say, I don’t mean only that religion is denied mention. This is one kind of avoidance, but another kind of avoidance, we know, comes from talking about religion a lot, or maybe, purloined-letter style, treating religion as matter of fact, an ordinary given.

Following this thread of the avoidance of religion: we see it not only in philosophy of religion, but also in theology, which wants to separate itself from “religion” … as if theology were just an already legitimated discourse, self-confirming, and religion showed up from without. Whereas what I’m trying to say is that religion is internal to theology, in fact religion is the product of theology (or at least the two are co-constitutive). And of course the question of the avoidance of religion is at issue in my genealogy of religion and secularism. The thesis there, it could be said, is that religion functions to produce transcendence (i.e., the denial of immanent encounters and compositions with others, i.e., the denial of diaspora) in collusion with Christianity, and that later religion functions to produce the transcendence of secularism. So in this sense, the book is about the heterogeneous yet resonant avoidance of religion across the apparently distinct domains of philosophy, religious studies, theology, and anthropology (or social sciences more generally).

I think the politics of this avoidance, or the politics of working to unveil this avoidance and think otherwise, are important to me in a way that has not always come through in this event. By this, I mean that the book was motivated by a sense that what was going on in social science and decolonial discourse about secularism was deeply connected to what happens in philosophy of religion, which cannot be separated from theology, which cannot be separated from the history of Christianity, which produced theological discourse, which in doing so produced the concept of religion, which was the historical and conceptual condition of possibility—to bring it back home—for the secularism that was being called into critique in social science and decolonial discourse.

This is the set of issues, and the order of approach, that led me to this book, and particularly to the concept of diaspora, which is motivated by all of the just-mentioned discourses yet reducible to none of them. Diaspora can thus be seen as an attempt to leave behind these discourses, but in a critical way—a way that both challenges and antagonizes their assumptions, but that also repeats them, in the hope that such mimesis, twisted the right way, put into different relations, might give us a chance for better politics, or for a better sort of existence in this world, an existence that might give us a better way of (politically) constructing it.

Some issues that follow from this concern, which I think it’s worth taking the time to emphasize …

(1) It is important to me, especially through my account of Paul and through my genealogy in Chapter 4, to show the dead end of universalism. We’ve talked some about this, but I want to stress that my concern, here especially, is close to deconstructive. In other words, I want to stress that the name of universalism is what holds together a number of unappealing (and inconsistent) moves: the supersession of “Judaism” by Christianity, the contemporary notion of Judaeo-Christianity, the idea that religion (including Christianity) is bad because it divides, the idea that everyone needs to become Christian (because Christianity provides universality), the idea that everyone needs to become secular (because secularism provides universality), the idea that all religions are equally bad because they are religious, the idea that Christianity (unlike other religions) prepares you to leave behind religion, the return to Paul in the name of secularism and/or Christianity, and so on.

What I’m trying to get at is that the claim, “yes, I get all these problems, but a true universalism wouldn’t be like that,” refuses to take the affliction seriously, it attempts to transcend the actual limitations of the problem, and in doing so it repeats the source of the problem. What I want to stress is that this error (for lack of a better term) is present not just in Christianity (let’s get it right this time!) but also in philosophy. There is a critique of philosophy that I am developing here, which would be that it shares the desire to transcend, even if what it is telling us is that there is no transcendence. For philosophy tends to orient us towards universality and to see the flaws in such universality as contingent rather than intrinsic to its own behavior. (Hence the similarity with Christianity.) And it’s worth noting here the appeal of Laruelle, namely that he, at least in one key moment of his writing, insists that philosophy’s flaw is not contingent but necessitated by its own practice. I would say that such a situation holds for thought about the universal.

In the comments Ahab pressed about my relation to Marx, and this is something to be thought about, as is Bruce’s concern (along a converging line, I think) for a kind of fabulative humanity. This is something for which I need to take responsibility (more below on that). Alain, as well, has pushed me on the practical political implications of this (as have some on the ecclesial implications), and Beatrice brilliantly pushed me on the question of the divine creature, which would be a god that is neither transcendent nor universal (indeed would be much less universal than Spinoza’s God, or Nature). All of these are ways of developing diaspora so that not just conceptually but also performatively, and in virtue of its content, it opposes universalism. But I would say that in all of these what we get are figures, experiments, even fakes, that enable connections—but never the idea of universalism, and never the idea that something “like” universalism would be needed.

(2) This is to say that thought must become more and more a conduit, a transversal, rather that something done from the position of the philosopher, or the theologian, or the social scientist. This may sound like I’m advocating that strange thing called “theory”—but only recently has theory turned toward the last of these three, and in general it tends not to take seriously the first, and almost never the second. So the book, in its performance, is meant to be a provocation to all of these positions.

(3) Also, one thing I am claiming is that secularism and Christianity are more or less in tandem with one another. (Which is also to say that critiques of the secular must delve back into Christian origins, Paul, questions of supersessionism, etc., which they almost never do.) I have not heard much in response to this. Is such a claim really that uncontroversial? Note that this would mean not just that somehow secularism belongs to Christianity, but also that Christianity belongs to secularism. This would mean that opposition to one would include opposition to the other, as well as to the secular interpellation of most of the globe (except itself of course!) as belonging to religion. Meaning that the possibilities of life cannot be articulated in terms of Christianity, secularism, or religion. I argue that they can and should be articulated in terms of diaspora. This, in a broader sense, is the thesis of the book. Is such a thesis correct?

(4) I think my critique of theology, and of Christianity more generally, is more serious than it has come across / been received. I really am not trying to improve theology, or to offer a new theology. Rather I am trying to show how theology is impossible, or how it requires a massive repression or willed misrecognition of material. Thus to take this material seriously would be to call into question the very enterprise of theology.

To be a bit polemical, I’m suggesting that we’re now seeing theological moves that try to take into account the instability and questionability of theology, but in such a way as to conserve theology, like a bad version of Hegel. One example of this is the “new apocalyptic” position, which deals with theology’s questionability on a conceptual-abstract level, but another example, which has been undiscussed, is Carter’s theology, which deals with theology’s questionability on more concrete levels, such as with regard to race. My suggestion, which I think my argument supports quite well, is that Carter needs to provide an account either of what his basis for a better/redeemed theology would be, or of how what he is doing requires a complete repudiation of theology.

(5) What bothers me in these cases, and in theology more generally—and of course secularism more generally, as I cannot stress too much that my critique of Christianity does not proceed in the name of a secular alternative—is the refusal of responsibility. This issue, as well as some of the concerns I mentioned under (1), above, are being developed in my current research and writing, which revolve around the theme of “conversion.”

Responsibility is a tricky term, but let’s say that what I have in mind here is not the importance of conforming to some set of expectations and norms. That’s not what I mean by responsibility. What I mean, more precisely, is understanding and affirming one’s desire, behavior, thought patterns, etc., with all of the implications they have. And this includes, I would say, grasping that one’s own desire, behavior, thought patterns, etc., while ultimately one’s own, are inseparable from encounters with others and theirs.

What I am concerned with, then, is the way such responsibility has been massively avoided by Christianity and secularism. (Perhaps my main point of interest in Gnosticism is that it gets that an illusion can become total, and this sort of avoidance of responsibility needs to be thought of in terms of a total illusion.) This massive avoidance of responsibility, by Christianity and secularism, cannot be separated from the “avoidance of religion.” What I am trying to do in this book—or really just beginning to do in this book—is take responsibility for this avoidance (or these avoidances). That, I believe, is what this book is about implicitly and all the time, even as it is explicitly concerned with different discourses at different times.