1) The Real Issue: The debate between believers and atheists is confused. The real issue is not whether one should side with believers that assert the reality of the divine and supernatural, and the secular who assert only the reality of the material world or the naturalistic; rather, the debate is between logics of transcendence/sovereignty/patriarchy/state versus logics of immanence/anarchy. The issue of supernatural causation is a historically important issue given our current historical moment, but a sidebar to a much more fundamental issue. For my part, I am an a-theist, not an atheist. What that means will become somewhat clear by the end of this post.
2) Structure, Not Content: In these discussions, it is a particular structure we ought to attend to, not a particular content. Thinking in terms of content blinds us to a far more pervasive structure that can be instantiated in a variety of ways. To think structurally is to think about relations between elements where a variety of different elements can fulfill the same or isomorphic functions within one and the same structure. For example, the blueprint of a house and a house itself share one and the same structure, even though they have very different contents. The content of the house is the materials used to build it, while the content of the blueprint is paper and ink. Nonetheless, they instantiate the same relations. Similarly, the structure of Freud’s myth of the primal father and his account of the Oedipus share the same structure– both posit a transcendent figure as operator of a prohibition –while the two have different contents (one talks about fathers in a particular kinship structure, the other talks about a mythological figure that has no limitations on his jouissance, ie., he is able to enjoy all the women in the tribe including his own mother, daughters, and sisters). If we attend to content we miss that these two things share one and the same structure.
Structure is the reason that discussions about religion are not primarily about the supernatural and the divine. Here are some logics of transcendence/sovereignty that all share the same structure: theistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, nationalism, Laplace’s Demon or the all knowing eye in a particular science that conceives the position of every particle in the universe and its current trajectory, patriarchy, Stalinism, group movements organized around charismatic leaders, the relationship between a manager and his employees, correlationism, humanism, ethnocentrisms, essentialism, Plato’s conception of the Good in Book VI of The Republic, negative theology, etc. In each case we have a term treated as transcendent to the rest of the social order, or a term that is treated as an exception. All of these examples are examples of the logic of transcendence or sovereignty. Whether the supernatural is involved is beside the point, though in our current historical moment in the United States, supernaturalist logics of transcendence play a privileged role in the ideological state apparatus.
read on!
3) The Lacanian Matheme: I have tried to articulate these structures in terms of the Lacanian matheme and, in particular, Lacan’s four discourses and graph of sexuation, cf. The Democracy of Objects, section 6.1, “The Other Face of God”, Speculations III, forthcoming, and “Two Ontologies”, forthcoming. The importance of the Lacanian matheme lies not in giving a false sense of “scientificity” through its use of notation from second-order predicate calculus. Rather, the mathemes suspend our focus on content so as to be better able to discern patterns or structures that are isomorphic or the same in a variety of different milieus. Absent the mathemes we end up saying stupid things in the clinic. For example, we might say that a child raised by two mothers or by a single mother is doomed to be psychotic because there’s no father to serve as agent of prohibition or to inscribe the primordial metaphor required for the genesis of ordinary neurotic subjectivity. The matheme allows us to discern that no male figure need be present for a subject to be generated because it shows how a variety of contents can serve one and the same function.
Likewise in the case of theological structure. The defining feature of theological structure is not a divine supernatural being. Divine supernatural beings are only one variation of theological structure. It is rather a logic of exception, transcendence, or sovereignty that is the mark of all theological structure. This is why Laplace’s demon, patriarchy, Stalinism, nationalism, and Christianity are all structurally identical despite the fact that 1) only one of these instantiations involves the divine and supernatural, and 2) that they have very different contents.
4) Function, not Belief: We should attend to how something functions, not what the agent believes. For example, when I go to the grocery store my belief is that I am merely buying food to feed myself and my family. However, at the level of function I am acting in such a way as to reproduce the system of capitalism. Insofar as capital production only occurs in the process of capitalism, my action is a part of that produce that continues to reproduce this system. This is not my intention, but is nonetheless the function of my action. Likewise, people have all sorts of reasons for attending a Catholic church or for participating at a soup kitchen– and these intentions and beliefs are generally benign and good –but because of how the money they contribute functions within that institution, or because their action at the soup kitchen does not address the causes of poverty and hunger, the person functionally produces a system that has very different effects. The point here is not that people shouldn’t work in soup kitchens, but that they should also be engaged in activities that address the causes of that poverty and suffering. Part of this requires overcoming the fetish of belief.
5) Institutions, not Theology: Deleuze introduced the notion of “state thinkers” in Difference and Repetition. A state thinker is a thinker that naturalizes a contingent social order and hierarchy by providing a metaphysics that presents that order as natural, necessary, and ineluctable. Likewise, state thinkers sanitize the reality of a particular state by presenting that state in rationalized form. Think, for example, of the way in which Hegel talks about the necessity of certain oppression and crime within the social order as a part of its rational functioning.
State thinkers are theologians. When discussing any theological structure– secular or religious –we should attend not to the gymnastics of theologians, but to how the beliefs of the lay and how these institutions actually function in the world. For example, Catholic theology presents a very pretty beautiful account of its institution– think Marion or Thomas –but the social institution functions socially and politically in the world in a very different way. Similarly, capitalist and Stalinist theologians present inspiring accounts of their particular social institutions, but these systems, but what is relevant is how these systems actually function in the world. Again, we need to avoid the fetishization of these beliefs and comport ourselves like ethnographers.
6) Ineluctable Violence: Social and intellectual structures premised on sovereignty, exception, or transcendence ineluctably generate violence. This is because it is formally impossible to generate a totality or a whole, yet this is precisely what such structures aim for. Every attempt to generate a totality or a whole generates a remainder or an accursed share– what Lacan calls an “objet a” –that marks what the structure cannot integrate or the failure of the totality. Participants within these systems see this remainder not as an ineluctable and necessary consequence of attempts to form a social and intellectual totality, but as a contingent accident. The next step is then to eradicate this remainder as that which prevents the social order from being instantiated so that social harmony might be produced. In other words, structures of transcendence, exception, or sovereignty necessarily generate a friend/enemy logic.
This is the lesson of Lacan’s discourses of the master and university, as well as the masculine side of the graph of sexuation (which is really a formalization of the logic of sovereignty). As a consequence, the violence that accompanies nationalisms, ethnocentrisms, patriarchy, state systems, theisms, etc., is not a contingent or accidental feature of these systems, but an ineluctable consequence of these systems. These systems necessarily generate an “other”, an “outsider”, a “stranger” that both marks the impossibility of the totality and that becomes the target of violence, genocide, eradication, and exploitation.
7) Not All Religions Embody This Patriarchal/Oedipal Structure: Pagan religions, for example, do not embody this structure, but rather a logic of immanence. Similarly, Buddha is not a patriarch in Buddhism. Likewise, there are even versions of Christianity that do not embody this structure (though they are very rare). Those variants of Christianity would be the ones that see Christ as an ordinary man (not the son of God), who died on the cross showing that God, the patriarch, is literally dead, and who was not resurrected, and where the holy spirit is nothing but a metaphor for the activity of a community based not on law, but love, and not on a label or tribal identification (“Christian”), but where anyone– atheist, Hindu, Jew, pagan, etc. –could participate. In short, a Christianity without God and without Christ as patriarch. Such religions are “a-theologies”. Again, the issue is not one of the supernatural versus the naturalistic, or of belief versus unbelief, but of sovereignty versus anarchy, transcendence versus immanence.
8) Transcendence is the First Form of Violence: Transcendence is the first form of violence as it is premised on the idea that the world is not enough, but that it is in need of transcendent supplement. As such, it denigrates all the things of the world– as Nietzsche showed –and opens them to violence and exploitation. This too is what is shown in Lacan’s discourse of the master and university. Integrate, consume, eliminate, and subordinate is the necessary consequence of transcendence. This logic can be found everywhere in theistic traditions and the history of philosophy.
9) The Aim is Immanence: The aim is to form a structure of thought and society based on immanence rather than transcendence, anarchical relations versus sovereign relations. This aim requires a critical project showing the illusion that lies at the heart of all overcoding forms of transcendence or sovereignty, as well as the formation of anarchical collectives not premised on sovereign exceptions. It is a necessarily anti-patriarchal, feminist project insofar as feminine ontology, as Lacan shows, is premised on an immanence without exception or exceptional instance. To see the world as enough and without need of transcendent supplement is a central task of a-theology.
Larval Subjects . 
August 17, 2012 at 4:59 pm
You know, this is very close to my book. Which isn’t out yet. So you win.
August 17, 2012 at 7:13 pm
I think you’re right on target, overall – whether or not non-patriarchal forms of Christianity are “very rare” (as opposed to just “rare” or “the minority”); or whether or not concrete, lived forms of Buddhism (as opposed to the philosophy that goes along with them) has a patriarchal/sovereign structure… these are surely factical questions. But I see that that’s beside your larger point.
What I do think is worth exploring more along with the points you’ve brought up is the relationship between the religious and the secular. This is clearly another dichotomy that is (1) confused, as the delimitation of separate secular and religious spheres (as regards both concepts and practices) is largely a product of the Enlightenment, or more generally the “modernist settlement”; (2) also not the real issue, as you imply by suggesting that what you call “theologies” can be “religious” or “secular”. What I do think is part of the real issue, and thus needs to be addressed, is the way that the division between what is called religious and what is called secular gets deployed across the structural types your outlining – or, indeed, whether this division needs to be deployed at all. If it’s possible (as I would argue that it certainly is and that you seem to grant that it is) to practice a form of life for which the name “religion” would be appropriate, but without recourse to a metaphysics of transcendence (I think this is what Adam Kotsko is alluding to when he uses the wonderful phrase “religious but not spiritual”), then ultimately what’s the use of preserving the modernist distinction between the religious and secular?
August 17, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Michael,
Good questions. I wasn’t using “secular” in any profound sense, but just to denote naturalistic ways of viewing the world. If I were to use it in a more sophisticated way I’d probably go with Taylor’s thesis that 1) “secular” denotes that moment where religion comes to be thought as a belief (the idea of faith as conceived today is pretty new), and 2) that moment where religion comes to be conceived as a set of options among which one can choose (or opt out of all together). In other words, for Taylor, secularity doesn’t involve the disappearance of religion at all, but it’s proliferation and pluralization. I know this doesn’t really address your questions, so I’d be interested in hearing what you’re after.
On an unrelated note, I think modern atheists have a really difficult time swallowing the thesis that religion has little to do with belief (despite what believers themselves say). If you go to a church you’ll find that the congregants or lay share very few beliefs in common. One believes in astrology, another that vile movie “What the Bleep?”, yet another karma, etc. Religious people are often themselves creeped out by “true believers”. This is why theologians are so often irrelevant to discussions of living religion. Religion requires belief to function as little as language requires belief or capitalism requires belief. It is largely an *anonymous* social structure, not a set of beliefs. Just as many people drink coke not because they *chose* to, but because their family did, so too with religion. Religion lies in the *practices* or *doings*, the activities and holidays, not the believing. This is also why atheistic debunkings are so often irrelevant. They are premised on the idea that religion is a set of beliefs, rather than a set of *social relations*.
We see something similar in politics. Why do people vote as they do? Common sense says “because they endorse the party platform and vote accordingly.” Yet study after study shows that people *overwhelmingly* support liberal policy. Why, then, does half the population vote conservative? Because that’s just what people in their social network *do*. The beliefs are secondary. It’s more about a basic identification, not a belief. Or alternatively, the identification precedes the belief, not the reverse.
August 17, 2012 at 8:02 pm
Levi,
Many of your concerns here closely parallel what Simon Critchley explores in Faith of the Faithless. I’ll post soon about his reading of Paul’s “other-worldly” nihilism. The key feature of Paul’s use of a transcendent term is that the world he is seeking to deny is precisely that of the Roman Empire (not the world as such). Transcendence, in this respect, is a statement about how another world is possible.
August 17, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Matthew,
Unfortunately Paul wasn’t appropriated in that way throughout real history. “Other worldly” came to mark a literal other world where we need to accept the lot of this world, not a socio-political transformation. Again you’re attending to an abstract and idealized conception of religion, to text and meaning, not its material reality. You need to mark that material reality and acknowledge it.
And lest you think I’m being unfair here, something similar is the case in Marxist thought. It is not enough to talk about the idealized theory. It’s also necessary to account for the material reality, ie, Stalinism. This is what’s so important about Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In their analysis of micro-fascism, paranoia, and the Oedipus they provided the tools for a critique of the horrors lurking in the communist party, thereby contributing to the possibility of forming a communism or anarchism that would surmount these things. You need that moment of critique.
August 17, 2012 at 8:47 pm
Re. the role of “beliefs” in religious life: absolutely. I actually think it’s productive to see beliefs as one kind of practice among the many that make up a religious tradition. Webb Keane has a great account of this with regard to the practice of reciting a creed in his book Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter – basically, that you get farther in understanding the nature of a particular Christian community (in this case, missionary communities in colonial Southeast Asia) by paying attention to what purpose the activity of saying a creed serves than by paying attention to the conceptual content of the creed. Now, I think it goes a little far to say that sophisticated theological argument (or, on the other hand, atheistic debunking) is “irrelevant,” because that implies a sharp distinction between theologizing and “real practices.” I’d contend that theologizing is also a practice, and one that can in certain situations be crucially important. But I do agree that perhaps most of the time it’s actually less important than it has historically claimed or been given credit for. Most of the time, at ground level (so to speak), debates between theologians and “cultured despisers” don’t have a lot of force.
Re. the secular: yes, Taylor’s analysis is one that I had in mind (I think Talal Asad is also very helpful, though, particularly regarding the limits of concept’s scope and the problems that accompany the attempt to universalize its implicit assumptions). So, if (like for Taylor), secularity doesn’t involve a purification of religion from the public sphere or modern life generally, but rather the pluralization of religion, my question is, I suppose: what is the point of preserving the disjunction “secular OR religious”? What does it mean to identify materialist, naturalist, or more broadly “non-religious” perspectives as “secular”? What work is that doing?
[and re. the immanentist reading of Paul, again I’d caution that while he was mostly not read that way, there are exceptions.]
August 17, 2012 at 10:57 pm
Michael,
Of course there are exceptions. That’s what I meant by remark that these things aren’t like Newtonian laws. I haven’t read Critchley’s book, but it sounds like ZiEk-Badiou’s reading of which I’m very partial. What’s important is that we don’t erase historical realities when we propose such readings. That erasure is what’s problematic in so much of the theological literature as in the case of Eagleton or in what Matthew is proposing. It’s something that needs to be confronted head on and theorized.
August 17, 2012 at 11:48 pm
Levi,
I agree, and I think any difference between our positions here is just a difference of focus. For what it’s worth, though, there are many theologians (albeit heterodox or, as Caputo has called them, radical) today who are confronting head on and working against structures that have traditionally institutionalized a metaphysics of transcendence/sovereignty/patriarchy, using practice-based and hermeneutical resources from within their traditions. The fact that one finds this tension within particular religious traditions, between impulses toward the sovereign and toward the anarchic, is something I find singularly interesting and part of why I think it’s important to question the religious/secular dichotomy.
August 19, 2012 at 8:03 am
This may simply be a trivial linguistic matter but I am wondering about how you would classify the type of transcendence found in the work of Levinas vis-a-vis the usual divine transcendence. As I understand it, though Levinas retains God, he retains God as an embodiment of the Infinite and, in this sense, could be seen as more akin to Zen Buddhism than to Judeo-Christian theology. In other words, if the transcendent is the infinite which is, then it is also immanent but is merely transcendent to human understanding. This is also the way in which Levinas seems to figure the Other (which I see as a shorthand symbol for Infinity); that is as a being which is transcendent because it is separated from our understanding though still materially present. This seems to be the relation that humans have with other objects in OOO from what I can tell (in that all objects recede). How does this “divinity” which is the infinite and thus figures as both transcendent and immanent figure into your discussion here? Or is this simply a matter of basic agreement but a difference in terminology?
August 19, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Hi Joe,
I’m not using “transcendence” in the phenomenological sense, but in the more traditional sense of an “entity that stands above”. I write about it a bit more in my article “A Logic of Multiplicities” which can be found here:
http://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php/analecta/issue/view/33/showToc
August 19, 2012 at 9:39 pm
levi,
do you think that your form of championing of immanence can bypass Laruelle’s long running critique of Deleuze (and philosophies of immanence more generally)? or do you think that this kind of non-philosophical critique is not a worthwhile “theoretical counterposition” to your a-theism and your onticology as a whole? if so, why not?
August 19, 2012 at 9:46 pm
B.M.N.,
I’d honestly have to understand Laruelle first.
August 19, 2012 at 10:24 pm
In an attempt to be brief – the unfortunate impossibility Laruelle’s work presents us with- I will only mention the claim Laruelle makes in “‘I, the philosopher, Am Lying’ : A Response to Deleuze” that “It remains to do or to practice, solely to practice, the immanence that they [D&G in What is Philosophy?] say and which perhaps still only that of philosophical saying: it remains to practice immanence with regard to their saying-of-immanence”(42). So although D&G speak for/in affirmation of immanence, the structure of their saying precludes the actual practice of the immanence they support.
To tie this into your project: you define transcendence in the post following this one (“Transcendence and the Problem of Boundaries: A Confession”) as “any system that erects some term to a master-term that attempts to disavow the flux and immanence of the world”. In effect, I think, you ultimately are forced in to a place where you can only say immanence yet cannot practice it because your form of immanence – exemplified by the feminine side of the graph of sexuation – can only be said in opposition to the “false” masculine side. Thus the inclusive paradigm of immanence onticology presents can only be sustained by way of an exception of exception itself, or an exclusion of exclusion itself. It seems as if immanence itself is erected as a “master-term” causing the disavowal (in the full Freudian sense of repudiation and registration) of transcendence. So the “saying” of immanence – dependent upon the exclusion of exclusion – also forecloses the possibility of immanent practice without the stain of exception (how ever small it may be).
So the short form of the question is can onticology only say immanence and never actually practice it?
August 19, 2012 at 10:39 pm
B.M.N.,
I honestly don’t know. I think we can allude to it and try to form social relations that that are more immanent. Notice that in the post you reference I explicitly talk about the complications that arise in trying to form a group without an identity.
My problem with Laruelle (and I don’t want a debate here as I just don’t know him well) is two-fold:
1) I think he ends up in a night where all cows are black, not unlike negative theology. You’re left being unable to say anything at all.
2) I think his position is the tool of ultimate academic mastery. It’s a sort of “more critical than thou” framework that allows the Laruellian to halt and master every other discourse through reflexive games.
My propositions are put forward in a much more humble spirit. They aren’t presented as certainties or truths, but *experiments*; ie, if we adopt these propositions what will we see that we did not see through other frames and how will it change our practices? That’s the ideal, anyway.
I hope you don’t take offense at that reaction to Laruelle; I honestly just haven’t been able to see how he contributes to the issues I’m interested in. The only reading that has piqued my interest is Katerina Kolosova’s in her forthcoming book The Cut of the Real. Folks in Dublin said they think my positions are quite close to Laruelle’s on a number of points, though again I’m unclear as to what he’s on about and see little incentive for the investment of my time to find out.