LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

dialogue might bear fruit.

      A major emphasis of this book is the inseparability of the word from the speaker. The questions discussed are ethical because they relate to life, particularly as they have arisen in my life. It would be dishonest and counterproductive to pretend to a purely objective and detached discourse. This book grows out of my own intellectual journey, from a fairly standard version of contemporary North American evangelical Christianity, through a critical turn in confrontation with the writings of Jacques Ellul, followed by intense self-questioning in confrontation with structuralism and some of its contemporary incarnations. It is fair to say that after my master’s studies in what is now the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought (PACT) at the European Graduate School—where structuralist thought forms a curricular focus, and faculty have included Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Žižek—I was surprised at how well I was prepared to understand much of contemporary academic theology.

      For example, an incarnational question in this vein concerns the relation between bodies and language, between the word and the flesh. In her contribution to the recent volume Lived Theology, McClintock Fulkerson writes: “I used poststructuralism to destabilize fixed meaning . . .”^[8] She notes that “Lived theology is about bodies,”^[9] implying bodies as opposed to texts, and focusing on non-linguistic elements of communication. She ends by questioning the “final authorizing factor” of theological claims, but notes that “any attempt to portray real closure in our reflective musings on the faith would be at odds with the open-endedness of our lives and God’s creative and redemptive activity in the world.”^[10] This use of structuralist thought, whose critical power often derives from intensely questioning human-language relations, seems faithful; but does not such use finally undercut her ability to speak? If theology is primarily a ‘reflective musing’ defined by open-endedness and lack of closure, isn’t ethics hamstrung from the outset?^[11] Her faithful use raises further questions: to what extent is this simply direct appropriation of structuralism? If so, is it appropriately critical, or indiscriminately appropriative? In what sense is such use meaningfully theological? What, if anything, is the difference between theological and philosophical discourses? To what extent can such appropriation happen without detriment to either philosophy or theology? In what way might such a strong body/language opposition be faithfully theological?

      The present book thus understands itself as an exploration of a relation between contemporary protestant Christian theology and the influential ‘structuralist’ tradition in continental philosophy, in a charitable manner that tries to take both seriously.^[12] Specifically, I intend to explore in what way the former can or should engage in dialogue with the latter. As such, I aim to contribute toward an inquiry about contemporary theological ethics of communication, posing questions about theological dialogue and the meaning of the word for faith, today.

      Because my exploration takes shape through a reading of Ellul (himself a contemporary of this philosophical tradition), this is a consciously one-sided exploration. While I attempt to treat structuralism fairly, the reader who expects long developments on the thought of Derrida or Deleuze will be disappointed. Instead, I examine Ellul’s writings to draw out his confrontation with this generation of thinkers and elucidate his response, examining it as a resource for theological ethics of communication today.

      One-Sided Dialogue?

      It is an open question whether this theology/philosophy interaction might be a one-sided dialogue (as I have suggested regarding Le Dœuff), with theologians appropriating philosophers who ignore or even despise them and Christian faith. Slavoj Žižek provides a good case for study. When interviewed for Bad Subjects magazine, Žižek described himself as “a fighting atheist”:

      Bad Subjects: You’ve also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you’ve been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?

      Žižek: I’m tempted to say, “The Leninist part.” I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture.^[13]

      His books clarify his strategic engagement with Christianity. He begins The Fragile Absolute thus:

      One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era . . . is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises . . . How is a Marxist, by definition a ‘fighting materialist’ (Lenin), to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism? . . . instead of adopting such a defensive stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle, what one should do is to reverse the strategy by fully endorsing what one is accused of: yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms—the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.^[14]

      This trend continues in his introduction to The Puppet and the Dwarf, which explicitly suggests that shunned historical materialist thought ought to speak in theological language to receive a new hearing.^[15]

      Taking Žižek at his word, it is unsurprising to see him pursuing theological themes or engaging with theologians. But this engagement is explicitly and avowedly ironic (i.e., not intended to be taken at face value) as concerns his own relation to belief, and subversive towards those who claim to believe in a non-ironic sense.^[16] In The Monstrosity of Christ, co-authored with theologian John Milbank, Žižek sees in Christ’s cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Christianity’s admission that there is no God, its own ironic self-undermining. Reviewing Monstrosity, John D. Caputo summarizes:

      Just as in psychoanalysis, Žižek says elsewhere, the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no “Big Other” (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan’s symbolic order or what Derrida called the “transcendental signifier”). For Milbank . . . Christ represents a magnificent monstration of God’s love for the world, which takes the form of the excessive “paradox” of God-made-man. For Žižek . . . Christ is the monstrous moment of the death on the cross in which God himself loses faith and confesses the death of God, which is the theological result demanded by the “dialectic.” So the whole book unfolds as a theological and Christological bidding war aimed at deciding whether paradox or dialectic holds the most chips when it comes to making matter matter more. In this corner Milbank’s radically orthodox theology with a straight face, in that corner Žižek’s radically ironic, heterodox and subversive theology.^[17]

      Caputo describes this as more of a fight, a “bidding war,” than a dialogue. The fight is not unproductive: the book is a “first rate exchange” with substantial agreement, with both authors’ eccentric readings of Hegel constituting the book’s core. He notes that Milbank seems to perceive that Žižek is up to a certain mimicry, “offering us an atheism that takes every opportunity to mime theology.” According to Caputo, Žižek thinks “Milbank’s ontology of peace is so much fantasy . . . Žižek is a realist in the sense that he is encouraging us to realize that help is not on the way, that no one is going to save us, save ourselves.”

      Overall, Caputo finds the dialogue frustratingly ironic for both authors:

      What strikes me first about the debate is the irony by which both positions are sustained, both the ironic materialism of Milbank and the ironic religion of Žižek. Milbank makes no bones about the fact that the goal of his argument is to lie down in green pastures with his friends on the other side . . . [Žižek’s] whole point, as he says elsewhere, is subversive: to build a Trojan-horse theology, to slip the nose of a more radical materialism under the Pauline tent of theology in order to announce the death of God . . . For truth to tell, Žižek doesn't think there is a God himself who dies. Never was. The treatment is over when we realize that . . . He discusses Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Crucifixion the way an analyst talks with a patient who thinks there is a snake under his bed, trying patiently to heal the patient by going along with the patient’s illusions until the patient is led to see the illusion . . .^[18]

Скачать книгу