The first question I have is what ideas people have put forth in terms of “winding down” animal domestication. For instance, there are some breeds of various domesticated animals that simply cannot survive in the wild — they’re bred to produce the maximum amount of meat or milk and they can’t do much else. Would they be subject to further breeding or genetic modification to make them viable in the wild, would that breed be allowed to die out, or what other solution would there be? Similarly, would it be a realistic goal for all of these breeds of animals to return to their pre-human forms and live in the wild, or would we instead be obligated to continue caring for them insofar as we in a certain way “created” them in their current form?

Many readers know much more about these topics and debates than me — what are the basic proposals out there, if any? Do any seem to you to be more workable, desirable, etc.?

But then I turned to the afterword, written by the editors Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic, and saw the title “Theology and Non-Philosophy”. It’s rather thin on citations and footnotes, but when you’re writing about Laruelle, who believes that living philosophy doesn’t require the same apparatus as history of philosophy, I think this is forgivable even when it is a piece ostensibly concerned with introducting Laruelle. The point with non-philosophy just isn’t scholarship, but the construction of theory, and while we could have a conversation about the proper role of scholarship in theory it seems fair to at least concede that rigorous theories like non-philosophy at least count as an a reasonable option. So, even though I found myself reading Alkon and Gunjevic’s afterword and thinking many of their claims factually incorrect, I don’t think this is really the level that my criticism should operate. (As an aside – because I simply can’t resist – one claim they make that I don’t think is supported by Laruelle’s work at all is found when they write, “The life of the subject is, according to Laruelle, a faithful adherence to generic scientific or theoretical procedures”. The emphasis is theirs, but nowhere in Laruelle’s writing that I know of does he emphasize faith in this way. For him it’s always about gnosis, knowledge, and so the subject doesn’t have to be faithful, the subject simply is identical-in-the-last-instance with generic or radical immanence. This is important because it is a major difference between Laruelle’s theory of the subject and Badiou’s.)

No, for me the proper place for any critique of this kind of writing has to take place at the science of theology, what I’ve termed in published writing as “non-theology”. Again, interested parties should consult my essay in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, but in general what the editors miss in their advocacy of the centrality of Christianity is precisely the way this would inscribe a principle of sufficient (Christian) theology in the place of the principle of sufficient philosophy. The authors at one point write, “But why, if faith is the life adhering to generic non-philosophical procedure [it's not, that would be, again, gnosis], does Laruelle focus on the figure of Christ? Why does Laruelle invoke this name? The answer cannot be, as Laruelle sometimes suggests, that he is simply making non-religious use of given religious and theological material.” The answer cannot be? Wait… why not?! The authors go on to say the reason being that Laruelle connects his most recent work very strongly to the figure of Christ, which is true, but that does not mean there is any necessity there either! What we see the editors doing here is something akin to when Pope Benedict XVI said that there was a certain providence in Christianity, originally a Jewish religious movement, merging with Greek philosophy and European culture. It turns something completely contingent, ultimately insufficient, into something necessary, and absolutely sufficient unto itself. What the editors essentially are saying in this sort afterword is that Christianity has no need of non-philosophy, but non-philosophy secretly does need Christianity. This is perhaps Christianity’s oldest trick, at least as it plays out in philosophy, for Christianity is necessary because it, like capitalism, can always overcode anything that comes before it.

At one point the editors try to argue that Christian theology already has put forward some of the central ideas of non-philosophy, like the “given-without-givenness” of things since the pure transcendence of God is immanent in creation as gift. And here they point towards, though do not develop, a more interesting theme concerning the role of transcendence and immanence in non-philosophy. For Laruelle transcendence isn’t rejected, but instead is made relative. Which means, of course, that transcendence is no longer transcendence as the boosters of transcendence would like to present it. But Alkon and Gunjevic gesture towards the notion that transcendence theologically understood isn’t really like this. Instead, they write,

“Transcendence is internal to the structure of things that exist in mutual determining relation to each other, a relation that is positive and not just differential or dialectical; and so transcendence cannot, even in-the-last-instance, be foreclosed from any form of worldly knowledge. Transcendence as such is foreclosed: that which gives the world as a whole is as unknowable for theology as it is for non-philosophy; the doctrine of creation insists that the world is given without a philosophically recoverable givenness.”

This is what I have identified in a forthcoming essay as “weaponized apophaticism”. That is, transcendence here is said to be positive, but in such a way that it’s positivity cannot be confronted like the positivity of all other things, thereby making any rebellion against transcendence, against the underlying structure of the World, impossible. For what you would be rebelling against is simply an appearance, while the truth underlying the appearance always slips away. It is an unsaying, but this time it is the unsaying of creatures always in the name of the creator.

What bothers me about this essay is that the authors are deploying old theological tricks, analogous to the philosophical ones Laruelle rejects, that require the humiliation of human beings in the face of transcendence. And why? For Laruelle the point of emphasising Christ over God the Father is that Christ is human, Christ is in-person, whereas God the Father, for Laruelle, has the same structure as Hell and the World. Non-philosophy is a gnosis and as such it is a radical rejection of this World, not in the name of some Michel Henry-esque transcendence-in-immanence, as the editors suggests, but in the Name-of-the-Human (or for me Name-of-the-Creature), as advocated in Struggle and Utopia. What the editors want to do by insisting that Laruelle has a faith in the Christian version of Christ is to make non-philosophy submit, not to the Name-of-the-Creature, but to tradition, all the while realizing that what fascinates Laruelle about Christ is that he refused to submit to tradition as such. For, it isn’t Jesus Christ of Christianity, which Gilles Grelet describes as the marshmallow Christ (since there is nothing about marsh mallow in the candy and there is nothing Christ-like about Christianity), but the Christ of victimised gnosis. Christ in this sense is much more akin to the heresy (to Christianity) of Docetism. In this way one could develop a non-theology out of Laruelle without any of the primacy the editors think belong to the Christian version of Christ. One could look to Shi’a Islam and the Hidden Imam, or to Hinduism and its avatars, or any number of religious materials that are not Christianity. But in each case it wouldn’t be enough simply to inscribe non-philosophy into those systems, as if it were the occasion of their thought, but, just as he does with Christianity, those systems have to be inscribed as occasions of human thought and practice.

So when the editors end their afterword writing, “Could Laruelle have articulated his non-religious faith without the direction provided by his personal belief [!?!] in – his inclination towards, his attention to, his imagination of – Jesus Christ?”, the only answer that rigorously holds to the principles of non-philosophy is, “No, but that doesn’t make it sufficient.”

I had hoped last week we were moving away from that trend, but this episode was pretty ridiculous.  To sum up, it’s about how people often want back the things they used to have, and then they get jealous of the people who have those things now.

The most preposterous example of this was Don, who misses being a copywriter and deliberately undermines Michael in order to get his own idea produced.  Why would Don do this?  And over a dumb soft drink account.  He’s someone who has always respected good work — his resort to subterfuge  seemed so out of character.  (And why isn’t Peggy more competitive about Michael? Is she really so consumed with Mohawk?  The whole thing seemed odd to me.)

I found the episode’s theme operating on another level as well, as Bobby v. 4 had me wishing we could have Bobby v. 3 back.  I’m so sorry I ever complained about you, Pixie Bobby, wherever you may be.

• Why should students have to pay money (i.e., for the academic credit) in order to do free labor (i.e., volunteer community service work)? I’m already suspicious of reliance on volunteerism — if the work is necessary and valuable, the people doing it should be paid — but charging them for the privilege seems odd to me.
• Is the community really served by a series of ad hoc service projects by college students? Are community organizations really helped that much when inexperienced college students show up for a semester or a year to “give back”? It seems like you could make a lot of the same objections here that you’d make to something like Teach for America.
• Is this much more than a way for individual colleges — and insofar as the concept is increasingly becoming a factor in accreditation, academia as a whole — to manage their public image? “We’re not the Ivory Tower, we’re giving back!”
• And perhaps most of all, my question was: Can’t we just run a school?! That’s what we’re good at doing — teaching classes and assessing academic work. I don’t know that the average professor is well-equipped to assess community service work (and according to what criteria, etc. — for instance, I wondered whether your average college would count work for a church or a crisis pregnancy center). Why not just stick to our strengths and let other types of organizations coordinate their own specific types of work?

I guess I just don’t understand why this needs to be something that colleges qua colleges need to be involved in. If students want to get involved with community service, that’s wonderful — in what way is it part of an academic program, though? Yes, students do “learn” in the broad sense from such experiences, but then one could just as easily say that they also “learn” from their social and dating lives.

If colleges value student participation in such things, why not give community service scholarships similar to what is typically given to atheletes, rather than charging students tuition in order to get college-certification for their community service work? Even better: why not aggressively target scholarships at community service-oriented careers so that students can avoid excessive debt and therefore afford to enter them?

This is all little more than free association, though. I’m more than happy for you all to tell me I’m wrong.

I am deeply sympathetic–no, make that outright supportive–of Weil’s desire to speak for those who cannot speak–or, more properly, that which cannot be spoken. The impersonality of this unspoken truth is crucial to Weil, and is apprehended, if at all, in the solitariness of one’s humiliation. She offers no concession to consolation in her work, which is often unsettling. I don’t read Weil as a masochist. Suffering, rather, is an inevitability, of life & of life on the way to the truth. If pain must sometimes be handed out as punishment, this is only because the inevitable is often disproportionately distributed and/or dissimulated by the secular appeal to “rights.” 

The problem, to be perhaps overly blunt, is Weil’s religious conviction. Or, to be more precise, the effects of her religious conviction. Though, to be fair, one needn’t be religious to go through the maneuvers of her thinking, re: the ineffable purity of truth. There is, after all, a kind of crypto-religious logic to even avowed atheists who confess as much. Weil at least wears her conviction on her sleeve for all to behold.

The problem, however, is simply too quickly to name the end of her search–e.g., the good, the true, the just, etc.–and in so naming, renders that which is named too static for it to live up to its claim. A static universal is certainly elusive, but it doesn’t seem to me plausible than any such thing, if it is to be universal, would be a single “thing” toward which one’s attention might be directed. In my view, the good, the true, etc., are only modes of attention, not its purposive end & ambition. I mean, in effect, that our attention has a hand in creating, in giving voice to, that (in Weil’s terminology, impersonal) truth that is experienced.

Weil is keen on moving from the personal to the impersonal, stripping oneself of the personal as much as possible, in order to achieve the impersonal. If she achieves nothing else in her body of work, she articulates in brutal, often ugly, honest terms what this transition actually means. While it could be interesting to think through how this move is played out in more sublimated, publicly acceptable forms, to stay on task here I want to say a few words why I think it is more appropriate to go the reverse route: from the impersonal to the personal.

There’s always a personal residue in the impersonal–your solitude is experienced always as under duress or threat. It is either momentary, or occurs at all only in spite of others who would deny it to you. Depending on your disposition, this residue sullies the discovery/experience or enhances the effects of its ineffability, i.e., keeps it elusive & one frustrated/searching. If we move from the impersonal to the personal, though, the “residue” is neither a problem nor a limit, but the context(s) from which the effects of the impersonal are realized here & now, and requires creative will more than it does revelatory powers. (Which is not to say this creative will is any more popularly commonplace than revelation. Indeed, one could very well argue that revelation is claimed far more often than creative politics.)

Consider those who have no proper voice from which to cry their pain. In less dramatic language, we might think of them, in the language of Jacques Rancière, as those who have no proper place in the political community, and who thus lack (that is to say, are denied) the capacity freely & coherently to synthesize and articulate their perspective of the sensual world. They are, in effect, the proletariat who ordinarily play no role or part in the giving or taking from the shared world of experience. Whether his thought actually allows this to happen or not, Rancière argues that politics is precisely that event when such a people nonetheless forcibly partake in that aesthetic/sensory experience, and thus in that creative community. In politics they, in effect, create the voice(s) they have been denied, and thus slaves who have ceased to be subservient; in more positive language, they have made a claim to freedom.

What I find so profound about this kind of claim, though, is that it is not strictly a “discovery” or “assertion” of a natural state or expectation: if this claim to freedom reveals anything at all it is that there is nothing natural about social roles and positions. The more preposterous the claim the better, devoid of any justification or quality (this is in line with Weil’s resistance to the claiming of “rights.”) In such a claim, any preconceived or sought-for correlation between social role and natural capacity is shown to be purely theatrical–that the slave is no more essentially so than is the noble politician–that there is no “but for the grace of God go I”–and thus artificial to the core. Importantly, this is not to say that theatricality and artifice should be dismissed. The “revelation” as such is not its eradication any more than is the knowledge that an actor on a stage is playing a role. Artifice can be abusive, of course, and tend to become so when (a) it is unknown/unacknowledged or (b) the roles have become overly typecast. Both conditions occur all too readily, usually on the level of “la politique,” as Ken Surin brought up in a recent comment thread, which is precisely what keeps the critique of “le politique” in play.

In artifice, one might say, we are freed to enact a kind of true thinking or attention that authenticity would otherwise deny (i.e., about that which/those who are constitutively silent).

Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz died on May 13, 2012 at age 69 after having received the Holy Sacraments. Ada Maria was born in La Habana, Cuba, on March 22, 1943, the daughter of Josefina Diaz de Isasi and Domingo G. Isasi-Battle (RIP 2005). She lived her youth in Cuba, studying in La Habana where she graduated from Merici Academy in 1960.

She moved to the United States in 1960 with her family, and soon after entered the Ursuline novitiate in Santa Rosa, California.  After finishing studies at New Rochelle College, NY, Ada was sent to Lima, Peru by the order to work among the poor in the “barriada de Miramar”.  There she became passionate in caring for the dispossessed and building the “kin-dom” of God.

After leaving the convent in 1969, she lived with her family in the United States.  Realizing that she had a continued calling to be an educator and a voice for the underprivileged, Ada Maria moved in 1975 to Rochester, New York where she served in two inner city parishes and became involved in the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC).

Ada Maria earned a Masters of Divinity and a Doctorate in Theology from Union Theological Seminary, in New York City in 1990.  At Union, she started her lifelong engagement and leadership in the community of Liberation Theologians. Continuing her commitment to women’s issues, she coined the term Mujerista theology to make explicit the Latina voice in Feminist Liberation Theology.

In 1991, Ada Maria became a professor of Ethics and Theology at Drew University, Madison, NJ from where she retired in 2009. Students were very fond of her and described her as someone who was a demanding teacher, fair, honest and passionate. While at Drew University, she co-founded the Hispanic Theological Institute for training of Hispanic Theologians.

She was a prolific writer, completing eight books, and many scholarly articles.  Her seminal work was Mujerista Theology: a Theology for the 21st Century. 

She is survived and remembered by her mother, sisters, and brother, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, her nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews, friends and the community of women she mentored and inspired.

Melville explains the cause of the war: “the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.” The political theology themes are raised clearly: the conjunction of progressivist/enlightenment ideology with a systematic reduction of humanity to bare life. The reference to “Anglo-American” suggests the racial basis of the empire, something made explicit in the so-called “Cornerstone Speech” given in the opening days of the Confederacy by its newly minted Vice President, Alexander Stephens: “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Stephens goes on to make the point that the Confederacy is the most advanced and enlightened of all nations: “It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society.” Melville refuses to base his rejection of this attempt to build a racist empire upon the ground of theological dogma of any kind. In fact, he appeals to the groundless uncertainty (shall we call it undecideability) that makes self-righteousness impossible: “Let us revere that sacred uncertainty which forever impends over men and nations. Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall. But we should remember that emancipation was accomplished not by deliberate legislation. Only through agonized violence could so mighty a result be effected. In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty to the blacks let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen, measures of a nature to provoke, among other of the last evils, exterminating hatred of race toward race.” A political theology based upon anything except “that sacred uncertainty” (and perhaps we should consider that this uncertainty, for Melville, extends even to the existence of God, let alone of which side he is on). And any political theology that raises the flag of a permanent “state of exception” in which “constitutional rightfulness” is nullified, runs the risk of legitimizing “exterminating hatred” as its extralegal principle.

Finally, a word about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Like Melville, he rejects any appeal to certainty that God is on the side of the North and the South is in thrall to the Devil. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Lincoln acknowledges that it is the entire nation that is suffering, and, if God’s hand that is behind the war, it falls on both the North and South equally, for their equal culpability. In words that can only astonish someone who has mostly heard the din of self-righteous zealotry from the mouths of most politicians, Lincoln has the audacity to draw down the full force of God’s wrath upon his nation for its sin of slavery: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said `the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

What makes Melville and Lincoln deserve a place in the canon of political theological texts is that they understand that divine justice cannot be executed by one human against another, and to think that one is empowered to do so is to set up the conditions of “exterminating hatred.” Divine justice, if it exists—and this must be the heart of a “sacred uncertainty”—demands the rejection of both forms of humanity’s hybris: the attempt to build an empire upon the systematic degradation of one’s fellow human, and the attempt to wage a permanent war upon this empire as if it were in thrall to the Antichrist. In both forms of hybris, whether it means an empire built on slavery or a war upon the Antichrist, humanity is playing God and taking his justice into its own hands against itself. Political theology, if it does nothing else, should “mind the gap” between divine and human justice. To imagine that there is no gap is suicidal.

Thinking it through over the last few days, however, I believe I have finally come up with an elegant and economical way to introduce the topic to a generally educated audience: “As you may be able to tell, Jesus has always been something of a solution in search of a problem…”

The documentary Huerfano Valley picks up with three of the veterans of the Huerfano commune scene — George, who still lives at the AAA (and whom I’m going to join for dinner after I write this on Sunday afternoon); Dean, who lives at Libre; and Muffin, who left Libre and works as a veterinarian in Huerfano County. Each reflects a certain flavor of sadness about this very American god that failed.

George leads the camera into the remains of houses built too high on the mountain to reach, a metaphor that director Elisa Larvego knows better than to call any more attention to than necessary. He trudges up and down the AAA’s hills, spinning melancholic tales, wearily poking through what he calls his “hippie ruin”. His songs, originals and covers on mandolin and guitar, accompany the film; he sings in the breaks of his voice, cracking the melodies open to mix sweetness with the sorrow.

Dean, painting big, colorful canvases in his studio at Libre, also conveys a sense of sadness about the pursuit, but where George is melancholic, Dean reflects the grace that follows grief. He lost a wife and a daughter while at Libre; he reflects on how much he thought he’d given up by coming out to Huerfano, and how much more loss he experienced beyond the expectations of his intentional communities. He takes Elisa up on the mountain he thinks about jumping off when he’s ready to end it all. “But if I can still make it up here,” he says, “then I might as well live.”

Muffin, who addresses the camera both from her horse stable and from her hot tub, has the most perspective on the whole affair; she watched her kids grow up with hippie values but, understandably, yearning to experience the material world she’d rejected. There’s little in her memories that suggests Libre ever struck her as a sustainable project; she remains haunted by a woman, Alex, who went missing, and whose body Muffin half-found floating in the pond, knowing it was there but only half-perceiving it out of the corner of her eye before returning to the camp and putting the onus on someone else.

The film is only 67 minutes long and lets its subjects tell their story without embedding it in historical context or judgement. A narrative of ruin and disappointment emerges, but it’s too personal to be a generalization condemning (or celebrating) commune culture. There are a few sociological guesses — Muffin describes what happened when the pot culture went from growing and sharing to growing and selling (to the tune of George singing “Money Changes Everything”); George suggests that intentional communities won’t succeed unless mutual intention is met by mutual need. There are more stories to tell about the communes — here’s one, by one of their contemporaries — and they are not without accomplishments that live on in the culture. But this is not that.

Both the landscape and the living spaces are documented beautifully. It’s hard to avoid a permeating sense of Kunderan lightness, the terror of rootlessness. The communes chose to live lightly upon the land, to approach the push and pull of civilization with much less push than their parents had. The indifferent wilderness will swallow their works back up sooner than most of ours, and might that not be all right? In the meantime, Aunt Adrienne’s bakery has a strong hint of commune flavor (in its sociability, not its hygiene. George claims that his peers were “the original dirty fucking hippies”). Not to mention amazing jalapeño cheese bread. Stop in!