In my last post I localized a paradox at the heart of Lacan’s teaching. On the one hand, Lacan puts forward a “true formula of atheism” that states that God is unconscious. There the line of reasoning seems to run that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and that the Other does not exist. This would be a clever, indirect way of saying “God does not exist”. On the other hand, Lacan says that the gods belong to the order of the Real. How is it possible to reconcile these two claims. With respect to God and religion, I think Lacan can be seen as proposing what I call an “A-Theology”. A-Theology is not atheism, though it is related to some standard claims of atheism. Most generally, atheism is the denial of any sort of supernatural causation in the world and the existence of anything supernatural. In debates with religious belief, it generally points to the lack of evidence for miracles, the supernatural, souls, etc., and therefore the absence of reasons to believe in such things.
Of course, in relation to the findings of contemporary ethnology, it has become possible to charge the atheist with missing the point with respect to myth. Here the argument would run that myth is a particular way of understanding the world that was never intended to be taken literally. As I heard Caputo once put it at a conference when defending religion, “Of course the figures and miraculous events we see depicted in sacred texts and myths did not take place. Rather, the myths and stories of religion are closer to comic book stories, representing struggles between good and evil, the nature of the world, the meaning of life, etc.” Caputo’s thesis, of course, begs the question of why, if this is all myths are, we don’t choose better literature such as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, etc. But whether we go with a somewhat unsophisticated thesis like Caputo’s or a more well developed thesis like Levi-Strauss’ approach to myth, the point remains the same: When we criticize these stories on the grounds that they violate the natural order and that there is no evidence in support of their truth, we have made a category mistake. We have failed to understand that myth is relating to truth and meaning in a different way. While there is certainly a great deal of truth to this thesis, it’s obvious shortcoming is that many followers of particular religious beliefs do take these stories literally rather than figuratively. Nonetheless, were this way of relating to myth to become the dominant paradigm in actual religious practices, it would be a substantial advance allowing for a much different dialogue between atheists and believers.
A-Theology, by contrast, differs from atheism in that its aim is not to refute or debunk claims about the supernatural. Where atheism focuses obsessively on religion as an explanatory hypothesis about the nature of the world, A-Theology, by contrast, is directed at a particular structure of thought and a particular form of social organization that it refers to, for lack of a better word, as “theological”. In this connection, it is crucial to emphasize that from the standpoint of A-Theology the conditions under which a particular structure of thought or social organization contains elements of the supernatural matters not a whit. In other words, a structure of thought or a form of social organization could be entirely secular in character, it could be an ultra-materialism, and nonetheless remain theological from the standpoint of A-Theology. Likewise, a form of social organization or thought could be pervaded by appeals to all sorts of supernatural phenomena and nonetheless be characterized as “a-theological” from the standpoint of A-Theology. The arch-materialist and determinist Pierre-Simon Laplace is an excellent example of a materialistic account of the universe that is nonetheless thoroughly theological. This is not because Laplace attributed the workings of matter to God– when Napoleon asked him about the place of God in his system, he famously replied “Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse. –but rather because of the curious role that Laplace’s Demon plays in his understanding of nature. Similarly, perhaps Greece, prior to Platonic thought can be understood as A-Theological, despite being pervaded by all sorts of deities and supernatural phenomena. Given these two examples, it is clear that the distinguishing mark between the A-Theological and the Theological has nothing to do with the supernatural or the sorts of causality that function in the world.
read on!
Perhaps the best way to situate the difference between the Theological and the A-Theological is in terms of Lacan’s graphs of sexuation. Before outlining how the graphs of sexuation might help in distinguishing the theological from the A-Theological, it is first important to respond to a criticism. In some of these discussions I have been criticized for reading the Gospels through the lens of Levi-Strauss and Lacan because Jesus did not read either of these figures. Because Jesus did not read these figures, the “argument” seems to go, he could not have been presenting a Lacanian theory of the social. It is difficult to know how to respond to such a criticism because it seems fundamentally blind to what a theory is such that it fails to understand the relationship between explanandum and explanans. Lacanian theory, ethnography, etc., are an explanans or a particular body of theories designed to explain a set of human practices, phenomena, behaviors, etc. The question of whether or not the human phenomena to be explained is familiar with the theory is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the theory does the explanatory work it is supposed to do. For example, nine out of ten patients have little or no knowledge of the theoretical orientations of their therapists. Yet this ignorance on the part of the patient has no bearing on whether or not the therapist has given a true explanation of some symptom their patient is suffering from. The patient doesn’t have to agree with the theory or know the theory for the explanation to be true because the truth or falsity of the theory is to be evaluated at a different level. Were it true that the phenomenon being explained by the theory required familiarity on the part of a person being explained, this would entail that evolutionary theory was not true– as Graham recently put it to me –prior to Darwin formulating evolutionary theory and people coming to knowledge of Darwin’s theory. Such a line of thought and criticism is simply absurd.
As I remarked in a previous post, Lacan’s concept of the Real does not refer to what we would ordinarily refer to as “reality” or mind independent objects that are what they are regardless of whether or not anyone knows it, but rather refers to formal deadlocks in the symbolic order. Lacan adopts a correlationist account of reality– which is perfectly appropriate and necessary when talking about the lived human relation to the world –where reality is an amalgam of the Imaginary (the regime of images correlated with the body) and the symbolic. The “Real”, by contrast, refers to the impossible or structural deadlocks within the symbolic order. These deadlocks are, as it were, something we call “real” in the sense that they will not budge. Try as you might, struggle all you want, but at the level of language if it is the case that the Barber of Seville cuts everyone’s hair except for those who cut there own hair, it is impossible to answer the question of who cuts the Barber’s hair. At the level of reality, of course, there is no problem here. The barber either cuts his own hair or he has someone else cut his hair. But at the level of the signifier, the symbolic, language, it is impossible to resolve the issue of who cuts the Barber’s hair because he is logically prohibited from having someone else cut his hair (as then he would be cutting his own hair, thereby violating the rule) and he is logically prohibited from cutting his own hair (because he cuts everyone’s hair except those who cut their own hair).
All of this, of course, seems quite idiotic as we all know that the Barber just goes to another Barber. However, this only seems idiotic until we recall that, according to Freud, the unconscious does not distinguish between reality and fantasy. From the standpoint of the unconscious, there is no difference between representations that are merely fantasized and representations that refer to something real. If it is true that the unconscious is structured like a language, as Lacan argued, then these formal aporia become very important with respect to linguistic structure because they cannot be escaped through a flight into reality where the Barber would simply flaunt the rule and go to another barber. Rather, the representational structure is all the unconscious has to go on. Lacan’s thesis, from his middle teaching beginning around Seminar 9, to his final teaching– but already hinted at in his earlier teaching in seminars like Seminar 3 and 6 –was that psychic structure and its accompanying symptoms should be understood as an attempt to resolve these formal deadlocks. As Lacan cryptically puts it in Seminar 11, “…what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real– a real that may well not be determined” (22). As Lacan articulates it in Seminar 3, Psychosis, in the case of hysteria the real takes the form of the question “am I a man or a woman?” By contrast, in the case of obsessional neurosis, the real takes the form of the question “am I alive or am I dead?” I won’t outline precisely how these questions are to be understood– having done so many times before on this blog already –but in both cases psychic structure is dealing with a formal deadlock or impasse not unlike Russell’s Paradox or the Barber of Seville Paradox. This deadlock functions as a sort of perpetual motion machine at the level of the unconscious where the symbolic attempts to provide a resolution to this Real, that becomes the origin of the various formations of the unconscious and symptoms that haunt the neurotic. This quick gloss, however, shows how indebted Lacan is to Levi-Strauss’s account of myth where myth functions to surmount and overcome certain formal deadlocks, contradictions, and impasses in the symbolic order.
It is in this spirit that we should approach Lacan’s rather mis-named graphs of sexuation. Any reading of the seminars in which Lacan developed his graphs of sexuation show– I think –that they have a rather fraught and tenuous relationship to anything pertaining to sex or gender. Not only does Lacan concede that anyone can occupy either side of the graphs regardless of their biological sex, but it is difficult to see why we would call one side feminine and another side masculine for any other reason beyond common cultural stereotypes pertaining to the organization of gendered desire. However, while the graphs might not give a very plausible account of gendered desire, they do give a good account of two ways in which the symbolic fails and how speaking-beings attempt to navigate this failure. Rather than referring to these two formal impasses as “masculine” and “feminine” (the left-hand and right-hand of the graph above respectively), we can instead refer to the two sides of the graph as “Incompleteness” and “Inconsistency”.
As I mentioned in my last post, the symbolic order is characterized by an intrinsic impossibility of totalization by virtue of the nature of the signifier. Insofar as the signifier cannot signify itself, insofar as each signifier requires another signifier in order to produce effects of signification, it follows that it is impossible to form a totality of language or a set of all signifiers. If this is the case, then it is because the signifier is a set that prohibits self-membership, such that a set of all sets that do not belong to themselves would either involve one signifier too few or one signifier many. We could also formulate this problem in terms of Cantor’s Paradox where even if we allowed self-membership in the case of signifiers it would nonetheless be impossible to form a set of all sets because the powerset of any set is always greater in size than the initial set itself, and because every set includes its subsets. Joyce, in his final work Finnegan’s Wake, could be taken as providing a graphic illustration of this latter thesis because his practice of writing shows the manner in which the signifier is always in excess of itself, harboring a terrifying subset of signifying possibilities– infinite in scope –that cannot be tamed or fixed by virtue of the polysemy of language. The upshot of all of this is that, as Lacan puts it, “there is no universe of discourse.” By a “universe”, of course, Lacan means that language, the symbolic, cannot be circumscribed or totalized. It is for this reason, as well, that there is no metalanguage because there is no point outside of language that one could adopt to tame this polysemy. Finally, it is for this reason that Lacan will say “the Other does not exist” and that “there is no Other of the Other”. In the former case, the in-existence of the Other results from the impossibility of circumscribing language and mastering this polysemy. By contrast, the theological option of postulating an Other of the Other (God) that would be master of sense and meaning is doomed to failure as there is no metalanguage. These are structural deadlocks that haunt language itself. Even God could not escape this Real or structural instability at the heart of the symbolic.
According to Lacan, there are two ways (for neurosis) in which this formal impasse can be navigated or structured: the way of Inconsistency and the way of Incompleteness. Lacan attempts to illustrate these two ways in his so-called graphs of sexuation. For anyone who is interested in a detailed commentary on the graphs of sexuation you can read my prior posts here, here, and here. The left-hand side of the graph of sexuation is the way of Inconsistency, whereas the right-hand side of the graph is the way of Incompleteness. Analogously, we can say that the left-hand portion of the graph is the way of transcendence, whereas the right-hand portion of the graph is the way of immanence. The upper portion of the graph with the logical notation illustrates the formal impasse or how the Real is encountered in a particular structure of desire. The lower portion of the graph, by contrast, illustrates the strategy that emerges in seeking to surmount this impasse. I refer to the left-hand portion of the graph, Inconsistency, as a “theological” relationship to the Real, whereas the right-hand portion of the graph is an “a-theological” relationship to the Real.
Both the lower and upper symbolic notations are to be read together in much the same way Kant’s antinomies are read together. In other words, the deadlock or impasse only occurs as a result of the two propositions being read together. Thus, the upper portion of the side of Inconsistency reads:
There exists an entity that is not subject to the phallic function or the law of castration.
We shouldn’t be frightened off here by the words “phallic function” and “law of castration”. The phallus, in Lacanese, does not refer to the penis, but to the signifier of desire and the signifier of lack in the Other. Castration does not refer to “having it cut off”, but refers to lack, limitation, finitude, or incompleteness. Consequently, the thesis that “there exists an entity that is not subject to the phallic function or law of castration” is simply the assertion that there exists a being that does not lack, that is not limited, and that is not bound by any law in any way. In terms of Plato’s Euthyphro, this would be the thesis that the Good is the Good because the gods willed it so, rather than the Gods willing it because it is Good. In other words, the gods themselves would not be bound, under this hypothesis, by any higher law that would curtail or limit their actions, nor by which their actions could be judged. By contrast, the lower proposition of the side of Inconsistency reads:
All entities are governed by the phallic function or the law of castration
.
This thesis states the arch-correlationist thesis that there is no exception to the law, nor anything outside of language (language introducing irremediable lack into the psychic economy. If this is the arch-correlationist thesis, then this is because it asserts that all beings are beings only by virtue of language or in a correlationist relationship between language and thing where no term can be thought apart from the other. However, if this thesis must have recourse to an exception– a being that is not subject to the phallic function –then this is because the absence of an exception renders a distinction null or senseless. Were we not able to posit an exception to the universal law of language, something that does not fall under this universal law, the universalization of this law would itself become meaningless. In order for this universalization to function, there must be one exception that allows the distinction to be discerned at all. Consequently, through a strange sort of unconscious doubling, the universalization of our submission to the law generates the phantasy of a being that is an exception to this law, that is not bound by this law, and that is the shadowy condition for this law.
In my view, the left-hand portion of Lacan’s graph provides us with the formal matrix of any and all theological structures. The distinguishing feature of a theological belief system and an a-theological belief system has nothing to do with whether or not it posits the supernatural to explain worldly phenomena, but rather has to do with formal structure revolving around the logic of inconsistency and exception. It is for this reason that we can say that Laplace’s arch-materialism is theological in character. In universalizing causal determinism, Laplace is led to posit his famous Demon that could survey the entire universe from an outside point of view, determining all future and past states of the particles that compose nature. Laplace can only envision this hypothesis by positing an exception or outside to the universe that allows him to totalize the universe into a unitary set subordinated to the law of causation. Formally, structurally, Laplace’s Demon is no different than Leibniz’s God functioning as the “principle of sufficient reason” for the existence of this universe rather than another universe. More significantly, however, we could say that this logic of exception is a phantasy generated by a certain psychic structure where everything is subordinated to a particular law, where we unconsciously are led to imagine a totality not constrained by the lack instituted by the law. Perhaps here we encounter the obscene and shadowy underside of the law, where something about the universalization of the law leads us to imagine ourselves being able to attain a state beyond the law whereby lack is converted into loss and frustration is obliterated, and to imagine ourselves as being illicitly enjoyed by some other that steals our jouissance. I’ll have more to say about this in days to come, but for the moment I need to get cracking and make my mother dinner for mother’s day.
Larval Subjects . 
May 11, 2009 at 1:17 am
How is it possible to reconcile these two claims.
But dr. Sinthome, what exactly is the difference between Lacan’s idea that the Real is unsymbolizable, and the Scriptures’ claim that if we were to see God, we’d die on the spot? And what exactly is the difference between faith and the process by which a client is ”healed” in psychoanalysis? If you can show me an analyst that can predict whether this process will take place rationally, I’m quitting religious thoughts altogether and I might even become a feminist.
Apropos: I was going to put this in a mail, but now I see it might be relevant to your queries. In a text on the differences between the Catholic and the Orthodox interpretation of religion, I found that the Orthodox do not believe that God is knowable (the Catholic do; at some point in the future we will get to know God). Instead, God reveals himself through divine processes in the world, and the believer is called upon to be LIKE God though not identical to God* deliberate emphasis. This can lead one to think that the Orthodox church is proposing blind faith (you believe in something you can not access rationally), but look at it from another angle and it appears that in keeping God within the unknowable realm, the believer is on the one hand called to a kind of a subjective destitition, of which you speaketh in the previous sermon, and on the other hand advised against PLAYING GOD, so that he intervenes in the world in the manner of a crusader or a right-wing fanatic.
May 11, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Adam, I think you must be referring to this post:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/god-and-the-big-other/
I don’t see that I there assert anything similar to what you’re suggesting, however. I might have, at some point, remarked that a certain treatment of God as real would be identical to psychosis as what is foreclosed in the symbolic returns in the real. This would be seen very clearly in the case of Schreber where God becomes something he’s directly related to. As always in these discussions, it’s important to remember the Borromean Knots and how they overlap with one another. God appears very different in each one of these relations. Of course, ultimately I’m going to go with the position that God does not exist but is a name of the failure of totalization itself. From there the argument will run that theological depictions of God try to suture over these constitutive impasses, falling into an imaginarization of the real. In other words, atheology is also an atheism.
May 12, 2009 at 3:48 am
Right, nothing similar at all.
May 12, 2009 at 3:58 am
Adam,
The thing about guys like you is that I never know where you stand on anything or what your position is on anything, so there’s no other recourse than to situate you in a common sense perspective of these issues. The problem is that you don’t spell out your positions and when you’re situated in terms of any particular position you cry foul on the grounds that you’ve been mischaracterized. In the meantime, you sit about spitting spit balls at everyone else from the comfortable position of complete opacity, while nonetheless seeming to endorse the most regressive and reactionary elements of our society. Even now, as you respond to my rejoinder, I have no idea what you’re responding to and where you see something similar. No doubt that’s because you don’t want a discussion. However, having had discussions with you in the past I’m not holding my breath as to you being forthcoming. This is what I’ve always referred to as being an “enabler”. You say you’re doing something different, you think your religion is somehow targeting “neo-liberal capitalism”, evoking some highly romantic eschatological aim for yourself, but I see nothing concrete in what you say and nothing that doesn’t function as a highly reactionary support for the very things you claim to denounce. When asked for specifics you say “read my posts” yet you never say anything specific in your posts. You’re simply guards for the reactionary movements you support, clothing them in fine gowns for what you claim to be denouncing. But, of course, you’ve thought of all these things before. Maybe, but you haven’t thought out their implications and are reactionary enablers. You’re response to this post will say the truth of you and where you stand here, so trod carefully. Of course, we all know your truth and what you stand for, regardless of how you care to rationalize it and romanticize what you’re doing. Then again, we already saw that truth in your vehement denial of statistics pertaining to voting and support on various issues. You’re ultimately all about narcissism and self-regard, rather than really changing things.
May 12, 2009 at 4:03 am
Or as I said over at your blog, you guys are like a bunch of rabid dogs, which indicates the lack of an argument and the lack of a position; or, instead, a position borne of ressentiment which is why we seem the same rhetorical strategies among folks like Limbaugh or Hannity. You move directly to the ad hominem or the status as a victim, rather than spelling out your commitments, which doesn’t come as a surprise given what you’re enabling. And if you’re not enabling that then start doing so from the pew where you might make a real difference. In the meantime, maybe you should stop arguing that your religious positions do not enable and support the worst elements of human horror and capitalism that you claim to denounce. But then again, that wouldn’t go with your wardrobe, as is the case with any poseur.
May 13, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I can’t respond in detail because I’m too busy working on an index for a book by my advisor, which attempts to undermine the claim that homophobia is a necessary constituent of Christian identity and in fact entered the circle of Christian discourse in its attempt to legitimate itself in terms of popular Hellenistic discourses that had turned a jaded eye on same-sex eroticism in the aftermath of the “classical” era. This is a sequel to his books on homoerotic narrative in the Old Testament and on the New Testament’s arguable portrayal of Jesus himself as involved in an erotic relationship with the (male) “disciple whom Jesus loved.” I studied under him at a strongly left-wing seminary (the first seminary to have a woman president, the first seminary to have an LGBTQ Studies center, the first Christian seminary to have an endowed chair in Jewish Studies, an institution that is deeply involved with poor and troubled communities in Chicago) that is cash-strapped due to its radical stances and that I chose to attend, despite having a more financially sensible offer from a more prestigious school and at great personal cost to myself in terms of debt, in large part because I believed in what the institution stood for. I have mortgaged my life so that I could be trained in the most progressive Christian school in the country and spread that message through teaching and research. I obviously have skin in the game here.
I’m not your enemy. I react strongly against you because you treat me like I am. And then in turn that apparently reinforces your impression that I’m Rush Limbaugh or something. The difference here is clear: I’m criticizing your writing and claiming that you seem to have a mental block about a certain topic (which is understandable given your environment, but still perhaps controllable), while you’re attacking me in bitterly personal terms. Get a fucking grip, man!
May 13, 2009 at 9:01 pm
edit:
“which attempts to undermine the claim that homophobia is a necessary constituent of Christian identity and in fact entered the circle of Christian discourse”
should be:
“which attempts to undermine the claim that homophobia is a necessary constituent of Christian identity and argues that homophobia in fact entered the circle of Christian discourse”
May 13, 2009 at 11:08 pm
“I never know where you stand on anything or what your position is on anything”
Ten months ago Levi, you were constructing arguments based upon a hybrid of Deleuze, systems theory, ecology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Now you are constructing argument based upon scientistic (not a perjoritive, but a description) speculative realism with strong alliances with analytical thematics. Lets be honest, these are the blogs, no-one really knows what anyone’s position is on anything, and mostly things seem to occur for the sake of argument.
PS The rabid dog thing is highly unneccesary.
PPS Reactionary enablers? Really? Why don’t I call you a enabler for global captialism simply because the science you think is a neccesary supplement is also required by the current construction of global capitalism.
PPPS The enabler position is really really not going to stand up to any social scientific analysis – you are claiming that Adam’s theology indirectly endorses the actions of the Christian right somehow by enabling their positions? How precisely? By what mechanism? Please present me some evidence how Adam’s project (among other things, a social-relational account of theological atonement) enables the extreme right (who prima facie would totally reject such a thing)? Via a parallel argument I could claim all your recent endorsement of science therefore is an enabler of the machinery of capital, could I not?
May 13, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Adam,
This is an excellent response to remarks and I mean that genuinely. Going back over our debate that has gone on for a couple of years now, all I wanted was the mere concession that this other form of religiosity exists, that it is a real phenomenon, and even a dominant phenomenon in our contemporary context. My charge of being an enabler– which having reviewed some of the previous threads from a couple of years ago appears to have been pretty consistent –lies only in denying this. While metaphysically I’m certainly committed to the thesis of immanence, I really don’t have any dog in fights where others are more or less aligned with my own political and ethical views though on very different games, i.e., I’m not playing the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett game where “religion is bad, bad, bad” and should be eradicated at all costs.
May 13, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Alex,
I don’t see the contradiction between what I was doing ten months ago and what I’m doing now, as I hold to the thesis that Deleuze’s thought is realist in orientation and don’t believe that psychoanalysis is at odds with neurology.
I evoke the notion of “rabid dogs” in the context of a highly abusive rhetoric that emerges in certain contexts that I believe to be unnecessary and unwarranted. I have the odd belief that in our relations to others our disagreements should be expressed with civility and respect to the best of our abilities.
When I evoke the notion of being an “enabler”, this charge is very specific. It has little to do with the content of another person’s position, but with how that person’s engagement functions to foreclose certain modes of critique in the course of discussion. For example, in previous posts I recently accused Eagleton of being an enabler for the Christian right. Obviously I am aware that Eagleton, as a Marxist, does not himself advocate a form of rightwing politics, so what would I mean in making this charge? In my view, Eagleton is an enabler by virtue of how he responds to Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett, such that he makes it more difficult to address the issues that H, D&D are targeting. In other words, Eagleton sets up a situation in which we get a binary where our choice is to say either religion is good or religion is bad. What he should have done was acknowledge the reality that H, D&D are responding to and show that this is an overly broad generalization about religion and that there is far more to it than they suggest. I hope this point is clear because I think it’s important to understanding my responses in these discussions. As Hegel taught us in the Phenomenology, a little recognition goes a long way.
I have never, to my knowledge, suggested that Adam’s theology enables these rightwing positions. First, I do not know much about Adam’s theology. I have asked both Adam and Anthony about their theological positions and they seemed to take this as an attack, telling me to read their posts (usually with a few expletives thrown in). That aside, knowing a bit about Adam’s critiques of neo-liberal capitalism and his relationship to Zizek and Agamben, it certainly would not occur to me to think that Adam enables reactionary political positions at the level of the content of his thought. My charge of being an enabler pertains solely to how Adam has responded to me in the past. Thus, for example, I would throw up some post on the religious right and fundamentalism, expressing ire over particular religious movements in the United States, and next thing I know I would be attacked left and right for attacking religion. This sort of attack enables these things by making critique of religious practices off limits. Had Adam et al. simply said “yeah those people are reactionary assholes and hold way too much power in the United States and dominate way too much of the church itself” those arguments would have never ensued. Instead I would have been able to say, “damn Adam, I’m glad there are guys like you out there working hard to change those things!” On my end, however, the message I got was that there was nothing to change at all because our religious institutions are just hunky dory.
May 13, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Erasing my comments is not cool, they were to the point of you accusing others of doing things you do on a daily basis – for shame!
May 13, 2009 at 11:30 pm
One further point, Alex. I think it would be difficult to claim that my recent endorsement (???? recent?) of science is an enabler of the machinery of capital for the simple fact that I’ve never denied that science (if we can even make such generalization or refer to something univocal like “science”) and technology don’t get caught up in these mechanisms. That’s the difference between these positions. Is the person claiming, as Eagleton appears to do, that the thing in question is completely outside of these mechanisms, or do they take a more moderate position, recognizing ways in which these things are caught up in these mechanisms while nonetheless containing revolutionary potentials.
May 13, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Mikhail,
I am erasing all comments that I see as unnecessarily ad hominem and as simply looking to create more argument or conflict. Your last few comments have definitely fit that bill. When you’re prepared to interact in a civil and respectful way that isn’t picking a fight, I’ll post your comments, but I see no reason to allow your graffiti on my blog when it’s more of the same that led to our blow up in the past.
May 13, 2009 at 11:42 pm
You seem to think that “ad hominem” means “mean” and “unpleasant” – it doesn’t, it’s rhetorical device. I wasn’t trying to provoke any sort of a discussion with you, I am smarter than that, just pointing out that accusations you make against others are the kind that you can very much direct against yourself. That’s not a point of argument or a graffiti, it’s a fact and you don’t see it, you need a serious moment of looking into the mirror, or a simple afternoon of reading your own comments calling others “pieces of shit,” “assholes,” and such.
May 13, 2009 at 11:47 pm
It’s really bizarre to claim that I don’t believe destructive forms of religion exist. I know they do and have experienced them first hand. Your complaints exaggerate to an extreme degree two arguments I have advanced. First, religion should not be “rounded down” to its worst forms — religion is not inherently fundamentalist. That seems like a simple enough acknowledgement, and you eventually do come around to that position every time it comes up, but for some reason it takes a lot of work. Second, the religious right is not actually the primary danger facing American society. They’re a destructive force, no question, but for the most part they’ve been coopted into a broader political coalition with much broader and more malign aims. They are responsible for allowing themselves to be coopted, but that’s not the same as coming up with the idea in the first place — for instance, it’s terrible that the religious right supported the Iraq War, but the Iraq War was not conceived as a Christian project (as far as I can tell). This claim has been much more controversial, and I understand why. I can also see why claiming that we should direct more attention to enemies other than the religious right may work to the advantage of the religious right — but calling me an enabler because of that makes just as little sense as calling you an enabler of corporate interests because of your focus on the religious right. It’s a tactical recommendation based on my good-faith analysis of the situation.
My status as a former insider may make me more cognizant of the religious right’s inherent limitations and weaknesses, and it may also make me secretly sympathize with them. Given that I willfully left and in fact aligned myself with a version of Christianity that sharply opposes them on all the questions that are at issue here, I see no reason to assume the latter — such an interpretation seems to me to verge on conspiracy theory, as though I’m an unconscious Manchurian Candidate for the religious right. Again, the only response to that is: get a grip.
Despite my opposition to the religious right, I think the early Christian movement was the emergence of something very important and that the theological reflection that came out of that event has important things to say that are worth attending to. I also think there are Christians and Christian organizations that are fighting the good fight. For that, I get these absurd personal attacks — which you apparently do not acknowledge to be such and appear to blame on my lack of forthcomingness, rudeness, etc. You’re playing nice now, but we’ll see how you behave the next time this comes up.
May 13, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Sighs Mikhail,
When Rush Limbaugh attacked Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s he was being an asshole. When someone attacked my depression and the fact that I use medication for that depression, they were being an asshole and a piece of shit. Such an attack has no place in civil discussion and is way out of bounds. That should be obvious. At any rate, I have no particular fixation on “ad hominem”. To the same degree that I abhor ad hominem attacks I abhor meanness and unpleasantness and want to have nothing to do with it on my blog.
May 14, 2009 at 12:05 am
Adam,
Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you on both points in your first paragraph. I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that the religious right is the primary danger in America, though I do on occasion find myself deeply exasperated with them. I think, however, that it’s nonetheless important to critique these movements.
You’re probably right that your experience as a former insider gives you a special perspective. What you say about early Christian movements is somewhat what I’ve been groping towards in my recent posts. Of course, my interest is in reading these movements sociologically, politically, and naturalistically, eradicating anything to do with the transcendent or the supernatural and simply seeing them as introducing an entirely new form of social organization. In my view, the dimensions of transcendence, the supernatural, the focus on Christ’s death, etc., have all functioned as ways of co-opting this radically new idea of the social that appeared with Jesus by directing socio-libidinal issues in other pacifying directions.
You were pretty rude over at your blog and over here as well (I deleted your original remark by mistake), so I’m not sure why you’re surprised, given our history, that I responded strongly. I play as nice as I’m played with. That’s generally the way it is with human interactions: do unto others and all that. It’s not rocket science.
May 14, 2009 at 12:16 am
Mikhail,
You’ll also note that the person himself who made the comment immediately recognized that the comment was way out of bounds, was very apologetic, and that after that little blow up we went on to have a highly productive discussion and put it in the past. It’s rather unreasonable, however, to expect someone to just sit there and take the meanness of another person and not respond in kind. The whole problem with this way of talking to others is that they lead to a tit for tat where everything escalates. Sure, I’ve made my fair share of obnoxious comments. I’ve never said otherwise. I do, however, think those obnoxious comments are generally responses to obnoxious comments directed my way.
May 14, 2009 at 7:12 am
“My charge of being an enabler pertains solely to how Adam has responded to me in the past. […] This sort of attack enables these things by making critique of religious practices off limits”
This is high level nonsense – when has Adam ever prevented you from saying anything you like on your blog or elsewhere about religion? When has he placed the critique of religion off limits? If so how?
Your category of ‘enabler’ does not stand up to scrutiny.
May 14, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Well I beg to differ as to how the phenomenon of enabling works, Alex. It’s a form of red herring and has to do with how a rhetorical situation comes to be structured and organized– not whether or not something is prevented from being said –but I’ll leave it at that, wishing no further conflict on this issue.
May 14, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Please, by all means, enlighten me. I’m genuinely interested to see how you think it works, and as a realist, I hope you have some evidence to show how there is a causality between the actions of left-wing theology and the extreme right.
May 14, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Alex,
How many times do I need to explain it? And again, you keep bringing up theology (i.e., content or a set of positions), where I’m talking about social actions and social relations. The content here is irrelevant. In fact, I commend much of the content. However, when we get someone like Eagleton who is right on content but wrong in his rhetorical intervention we have a problem. Eagleton sets up a binary between what secular thought can do and the revolutionary and emancipatory power of religion. In the meantime, he takes religion as an object of critique off the table, despite the fact of the very obvious role it plays in American politics that is anything but emancipatory. That is enabling. It never ceases to amaze me that it seems so difficult for some to get the difference between doctrine and actual practices, groups, and institutions.
May 14, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Or put differently, we’re talking about two entirely different things: I’m talking about religion as a set of social phenomena pertaining to institutions, bodies, groupings, and how they function in the social field, whereas you appear to be talking about religion in terms of various doctrines. To my thinking, the sociological trumps the doctrinal. If it can’t be shown that the doctrinal plays a statistically significant role in these social groupings, I’m not sure why it should be considered at all in these discussions as here, to paraphrase Marx, we’re turning the world on its head treating ideas as being more real than the social relations they reflect. The doctrinal is potentially powerful in producing change, but only if it proliferates throughout actually existing populations. Given that it’s actually existing populations that I’m interested in, their distribution of power and organization, the doctrinal is largely beside the point. This is why I wrinkle my nose whenever I’m told I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s such a strange argument because this discussion isn’t about academic theology, but actual distributions of power that can be discerned statistically.
May 14, 2009 at 4:27 pm
No, its not difficult for me to understand at all. My work in particular studies the relationship between doctrine and ‘actual practices, groups, and institutions’ and I am pretty well versed in social scientific methodology. And I am very senstive of the arguments Marx makes about the social relations being the ground floor of analysis, but, as later Marxists such as Gramsci have corrected, Marx has been far too reductive in saying the ideas don’t concretely effect practice. You appear to be making the mistake that the ideas don’t matter at all, which seems to be a rather bad position regarding religion.
To make the case you are making, you would have to prove to me that there is a casual link between Eagleton’s rhetorical intervention and increased power of those groups, practices and institutions that you object to. This would then be “enabling” their practice, even though this may be against his expressed intention. You would have to convince me that the rightists use Eagleton in this manner etc, accept his arguments and deploy his conclusions to their own ends.
And indeed, as multiple studies of American evangelical apocalypticism have shown, their doctrine regarding the end times, double predestination etc (think about the Left Behind novels) directly effect their social relations in a very troubling, but very obvious way.
May 14, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Alex,
You write:
No, I am not making this mistake at all. Of course I believe that ideas matter. However, as someone trained in the methodologies of social scientific methodology, you must also be aware that the ideas in question are a function of statistical significance in a population. In this connection, we have the question, on the one hand, of whether the ideas of radical progressive theology are present in statistically significant numbers in the American population. Do we actually find an understanding of God, scripture, the Gospels, present in large numbers in the American population? I don’t think so. This is beginning to change, but it is by no means the predominant orientation. When analyzing populations you go with what is dominant and defining the vectors of power. Moreover, you go with how people report their own beliefs, not with academic accounts of doctrine.
Yeah, I can’t prove this. On the one hand, I applaud Eagleton for very publicly presenting an alternative form of Christianity that is more in lines with my own political positions. On the other hand, my position is that he confuses the discussion by setting up a binary between secularism and religious thought by placing all the revolutionary power on the side of religious thought and portraying secularism as a defender of the status quo. I think that’s a supreme distortion of the sociological reality of how religion actually functions in the United States. Moreover, when I look at the major emancipatory movements of the last couple of decades, they are not coming from the religious but from predominantly secular sources. A certain form of religion could potentially become emancipatory in the way Eagleton describes, but so far as I can tell this potentiality remains largely a potentiality in thought not the actuality of practice or large organized blocks of ordinary people out there in the streets.
May 14, 2009 at 4:51 pm
No one is claiming that “radical/progressive theology” has widespread pull overall in the populous – who has claimed this? You are the one that is saying that these formulations are “enablers” of the extreme right. This enabling seems to have as much of a spurious connection to the extreme right as progressive theology has to the masses.
If you can’t prove the causuality why talk about enabling with regard to Eagleton? Or enabling with regard to anyone. Your argument seems flawed in two respects because it is essentially contradictory.
1. Eagleton’s arguments are part of the ideas world that might be called academic theology.Yet,
2. As you previously said academic theology has limited impact upon actual populations. The potentiality is in thought only.
So then, how precisely is Eagleton supposed to enable anything?
May 14, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Alex,
You write:
The answer is that Eagleton is participating in a public discourse and discourse has effects. Let’s go back to the actual Stanley Fish article in the New York Times on Eagleton’s recent book and have a look at what he has to say (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/god-talk/ ):
I’ll try to unpack this as clearly as I can. On the one hand, we have actually existing social relations. On the other hand, we have the level of discourses. Actually existing social relations have, as Marx argued, an impact on discourses and discourses can have, as Gramsci argued, an impact on actually existing social relations.
In the passage cited above, Eagleton sets up a stark opposition between reason and faith. Faith, says Eagleton, contains the power to radically transform our society and fight against capitalism and liberalism (I’m all for the fight against the latter, regardless of the grounds of that latter fight). By contrast, reason, according to Eagleton, has failed in this endeavor. Now this is the level of discourse in a widely circulated newspaper coming from a very public figure.
Now what’s my problem?
First, I think Eagleton significantly distorts the nature of actually existing social relations. Far from giving up anything like a radically emancipatory politics, Faith, at least as it has functioned in the United States, has been a primary element in our infrastructure standing in the way of any sort of emancipation and continuously functioning as an apologetics for the status quo and the dominant forms of capitalist power. There simply no way around this. The voting statistics don’t lie. By contrast, when we look at the last three hundred years of human history no force has been greater in producing emancipation and the transformation of society than reason and secularism.
Second, the whole problem with Eagleton’s argument functions at the level of discourse presented in a public space. Had Eagleton made the very modest claim that there is a form of Christianity that harbors the seeds of revolutionary transformation, then I would have no problem with his line of argument. However that’s not what he and Fish do. Rather, they reinforce the predominant narrative structure in the United States of the opposition between faith and reason, allowing the religious believer to get off the hook and say “nothing to see here with us folks, move along, we’re radically emancipatory!”
May 14, 2009 at 5:21 pm
And the New York Times suddenly has an impact upon the kind of religious believers you object so strongly to? In his argument Eagleton isn’t being quite so vague about what faith opposes capital – it certainly isn’t the kind of arational fundamentalism you speak of, but is a thick faith that in his mind is likely similar to his youthful left Catholicism.
I don’t object to your arguments against Eagleton’s. Then again, having not read the book I can’t tell if he doesn’t respond to your critiques in it. I just object to the status of him and others as “enablers”.
May 14, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Plus, considering his alliance of Christianity with Marxism, which right wing Christian is going to be saying “nothing to see here with us folks, move along, we’re radically emancipatory!” precisely?
May 14, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Alex,
It is not just a question of members of the religious right but of how the Symbolic comes to be organized and how certain forms of participation contribute to that organization. If you read my post on Topics and Torture
(https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/torture-and-topics/ ) maybe you’ll get a better sense of what I’m getting at. By analogy, were someone to vehemently argue that torture does not work I might very well label them as an enabler as well. This would not be because I am accusing them of defending torture, but because they’re defending the framework of the debate and reinforcing it within the social system, contributing to the broad social consensus that this debate should be situated in utilitarian terms. One of the only guys in the entire American media who’s challenged this, is paradoxically Shephard Smith of Fox News who flew off the handle the other day and dropped the “F-bomb” saying that it’s wrong regardless of whether it works. As for your second post about radical emancipation, you have to understand that statements or propositions, as Foucault observed, get detached from their context and origin and float around taking on a life of their own. It matters little that Eagleton himself is a Marxist. It’s how his claim that Christianity is radically emancipatory comes to function in a context divorced from those personal commitments. Something similar has occurred with Einstein’s various remarks about God. These get detached from his personal conviction that God is something like the God of Spinoza and now circulates among many religious believers as support, based on his scientific authority, for something like a personal God.
May 14, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Right I’m going to do this in a very dry style so we can get to the heart of this. But I will add, if it doesn’t matter the convictions of the source of the argument are, how can we hold an individual down sufficentely to accuse them of “enabling”? Surely as all ideas are wild, like Einsteins on religion, we can blame no one for being an enabler! Also, I know one book on Lacan and Theology that cites this site – are you then an enabler?
1. I take your definition of enabler to be a person or group who promote a problematic position, even though it is likely against their own position through the argument they offer.
2. In the case of religion, offering certain arguments shures up the power of the religious right. Because it endorses certain structures they also endorse.
3. In the specific case of Terry Eagleton, placing faith on the side of radical emancipation and hence the good and rationality/science on the side of capitalism and conservatism resonates well with the similar dichotomy established by the religious right – faith good, moral, science bad, imoral. Eagleton’s argument therefore lodges itself into the Symbolic by accepting, like the debate on torture, their terms of debate.
4. Yet to be properly sociological about this, we would have to show
a) that this resonance is indeed a resonance
The themes that Eagleton describes as properly religious – anti-capitalist radical emancipatory politics, the overturning of the status quo through imagination for example – are not the same as the thematics offered by the religious right, who are highly socially conservative and economically neoliberal. There seems to be no resonance here.
b) that there is a proof that the Symbolic of Eagleton and the religious right are inter-mingled
Considering who and what Eagleton is writing, and the above, this seems highly unlikely. Why would they rush to Eagleton for defense of religion, a religion completely other than their own conservative brand, when far easier defenses untainted by Marxism are avaliable? If anything they would not be pleased with a radically emancipatory version of Christianity, even one divorced from Eagleton’s own commitments.
5. Since he is not endorsing the religion of the religious right, and the religious right have no need of his endorsement or an idea of it, if Eagleton is enabling, he is enabling in a very thin manner, that does not establish a link between himself and the right wing Christianity you find (rightly) objectionable.
6. It appears that in general way then that Eagleton is endorsing religion in a kind of generic way, with no direct link to the ideas you find objectionable.
7. Hence this shows the analytical uselessness of your concept, because anyone speaking positively about religion seems to be an enabler of sorts. How is this at all useful?
8. This is basically the same argument as Dawkins who argues that any religious believer, not matter how radical, because he or she is a religious believer is enabling the bad beliefs of others.
May 14, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Alex,
Again, I did not say beliefs do not matter. In discussions about religion, however, I think we need to carefully distinguish among beliefs as predominantly present among populations of people and beliefs as expounded by highly educated and sophisticated theologians. I see these two levels of analysis constantly conflated and I think it deeply confuses discussion. I outlined the claims I found objectionable in Eagleton’s piece and also argued that we have to distinguish between beliefs as we find them in popular practice and academic theology.
This isn’t entirely right. Think of rhetorical strategies in terms of Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia, where something is always concealed even as it is revealed in every rhetorical act. Indeed, as I argued a long while back in a post entitled “The Alethetics of Rhetoric”, this play of revealing and concealing is one of the primary aims of the rhetor: to reveal things in a particular way and take other things off the stage with respect to an audience. For example, when I am using a cup to drink coffee, its status as a physical object composed of such and such atoms becomes veiled. Rhetoric does something similar. What I object to in Eagleton’s piece when I call him an enabler is how a certain dimension of religion practice as an institution becomes veiled. He situates religion as radically emancipatory, defending it against Dawkins et al, veiling the highly oppressive nature of mainstream religion. As such, he places a fantasy version of religion– one that has no real political potency in the present but which could in the future –in place of the actuality of religion.
No, this is not an accurate representation of anything I claim. I do not see Eagleton as endorsing any structures that would be remotely similar to the sorts of structures I’m talking about. The problem is that in his use of the overly broad and general signifier “religion”, he veils over the actuality of religion that is quite different from what he’s proposing.
Yes. I would claim something similar with respect to what I understand of RO where the aim is to promote a theological counter-modernity despite the largely oppressive role religion has played since the birth of modernity while denouncing the secular version of modernity. Here again the point is nuanced. I am not objecting to the project of formulating an emancipatory form of Christianity. I wholeheartedly support that. What I am objecting to is the rewriting of history and the denial of the present actuality.
Here I think you’re making quite a leap. There is nothing wrong with rhetorical analysis in discussing these issues. Were we required to do what you’re proposing we’d have to throw all of Zizek and a good deal of Marx out the window. It is entirely appropriate to denounce the rhetorical structure of Eagleton’s strategy even if he’s but a small pebble in a very swiftly moving river where these things are concerned.
Again this is a leap. Going back to my post on Torture and Topics, it matters little whether pundit Chris Matthews is inter-mingled with Conservative Neo-Liberalism. In fact, he seems strongly opposed to it given a number of comments he’s made on his show Hardball. However, when Chris Matthews airs, night after night, the question “does torture work?” and has other “experts” on to discuss this issue, he is nonetheless enabling those positions by how he has framed the issue. This is not because he has sided with the neo-cons but because of how he is contributing to the organization of what Heidegger called “das Man” or the collective common sense of what everyone knows. This is what I’m suggesting Eagleton is doing with his particular rhetorical approach. I suspect that part of our disagreement here has to do with very different assumptions about how the social is organized and functions.
Eagleton is contributing to something like a Foucaultian episteme or collective set of assumptions about the nature of religion that make it easier in the broader social field for the Christian Right to function. In Eagleton’s defense, however, I think the issue of religion resonates very differently in Great Britain than it does here and that he might be unaware of the very different political context, role of religion in public life.
No and no. As I said in my previous response– and maybe you missed it –had Eagleton 1) not set up a stark opposition between faith and reason suggesting that secularism only defends the status quo (which is a truly bizarre claim coming from a Marxist who is presumably aware of how many changes secular Marxist thought has wrought in the last hundred years in the workplace, with respect to worker’s rights and wages, with respect to struggles for equality, etc), and 2) had Eagleton readily acknowledge the reality of religion as an actuality and its political oppressiveness in our contemporary socio-historical context, and 3) had he proposed, like Zizek, that there is an emancipatory kernel to Christianity that can be liberated from its oppressive actual shell and made an impetus for emancipatory political practice, then I would have no gripe with Eagleton’s position. But he didn’t do this and instead played into the hands of a set of dominant assumptions that make it more difficult to discuss these issues, thereby contributing to the problem rather than the solution.
May 14, 2009 at 7:55 pm
This isn’t fruitful. But out of sheer bloody mindedness I’m going on.
Eagleton’s whole book, which neither of us I think have read, likely has plenty of ire to be dished out on the fundamentalists. He is likely to do 2 and 3 for you (isn’t the whole point that Christianity etc has a radical kernel?). With regards to 1, his point is that the likes of Dawkins defend, in the British context, the capitalist status quo. Being a Marxist, he acknowledges the plascity of social formations – while secularism might have been at one time emancipatory, he is permitted to point out that now it is not in the form offered by Dawkins et al – its not Platonism. I see no problem here.
I too am doing a bit of a stronger form of rhetorical analysis by comparing what the religous right believe and what Eagleton believes and showing how they don’t line up…which seems to be the core of your enabling line.
Just how much admitance of the errors of religion and its current oppressiveness would be enough for you before Eagleton can speak?
To enable the issue of religion all you seem to need to do is set the framework as “religion might have something to say that secularism as offered by Dawkins et al” does not. Anything pro-religious is enabling by this definition because it endorses the framework…
May 14, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Alex,
But this is not what a rhetorical analysis is about. A rhetorical analysis looks at how speech is organized at the level of tropes, metaphors, oppositions, etc., to produce certain effects of meaning and to generate persuasion. It brackets claims of truth and content to examine these figures. At any rate, I’ve made my argument to the best of my ability. I’ve outlined those circumstances in which I believe one thing enables another thing, I’ve explained why I don’t believe this is a matter of content or whether Eagleton shares the same views as the religious right, and I’ve outlined an alternative approach that, had Eagleton adopted it, would not have made him an enabler in my view. The point is a simple one about how ideology functions. Ideology is not a matter of what we consciously believe or think about ourselves, but about how we’re enmeshed in certain relations that exceed our intentions without knowing it. For example, when Zizek notoriously analyzes toilets at the beginning of The Plague of Fantasies, arguing that French, German, and American toilets embody certain ideologies, he is not making the claim that we are endorsing that ideology when we use one of these toilets, nonetheless we are caught up in the ideology in using them beyond what our intentions might be.
You’re setting up a straw man in your last two sentences. Not everything is “enabling” this particular ideology if it is pro-religious. However, I will say that any form of rhetoric that attempts to lay neo-liberal ideology at the doorstep of reason and secularism tout court while ignoring the deeply complicit role that religion has played in this ideology falls into the category of enabling and is not a position worth taking seriously given its own blindness to the deeply complicit role of religion in this formation.