The Christian Turn In Theory

Adam Kotsko links to articles by Roland Boer in Cutural Logic and Paul Griffiths in First Things. Both are about the Christian turn in Theory. Eagleton is the main subject, but Griffiths adds Badiou and Zizek to the mix. Adam says he finds Boer "much more insightful".

The Griffiths article turns out to be coated with a thin slick of condescension, fore and aft. I ask Adam: do you have intellectual objections to the article, subtracting the 'but of course they want to be like us, only they never will' tone? I don't see that this faint assumption of spiritual superiority - milder than any performance Eagleton or Zizek has ever managed, if it comes to that - actually interferes with the exposition. Does Griffiths get anyone patently, embarrassingly wrong? His piece seems to me a reasonable, not uncharitable take on Zizek and Eagleton's relation to Christianity. (I don't know Badiou.) If there are gross errors, I want to know. I think both linked articles are solid and interesting, each in its way.

Adam might be saying just that the Boer piece, which is longer, digs deeper. I'd have to agree.

I find it interesting to hear that Eagleton apparently has difficulties with the basic outlines of Kierkegaard's take on the Abraham and Isaac story. Since this was the burden of my Phil & Lit critique of Zizek - namely, he has the dubious distinction of conflating Kierkegaard and utilitarianism - this is interesting to me. Boer writes of Eagleton's treatment: "a profound slippage has taken place in the focus on Abraham: he is not the sacrifice but the one who offers up a sacrifice, Isaac. However, Eagleton insists in taking Abraham as the centre of this story, the one who makes the impossible sacrifice." So in both cases - Zizek and Eagleton - there is a confused attempt to understand Kierkegaardian faith as a kind of rational altruism. That will not do.

Still more interesting is the stuff on the personality cult, which I agree with. I think everything wrong with Eagleton's style rotates around his bad habits in this area. He is a thinker who always thinks he knows the answer. It is just a question of finding a way of impressing it on others with sufficient force to make a difference. He is an activist, not an inquirer. Well, I won't go into it.

I don't understand Boer's conclusion at all. Any of it.

My preferred approach is to take up Adorno's strategy and seek the possibility of pushing the move from theology to politics to its dialectical extreme. In this respect, one can engage with theology only through such a move. Or, to gloss Marx, a fully materialist theology can emerge once the process from the criticism of heaven to the criticism of earth, from politics to theology has run its course. But all of this assumes the prior status of theology itself. So here I want to invoke the second way in which theology may become a conversation partner: rather than deal with the problem of how we are to negotiate the theological history of terms now used in political context, might it not be the case that the theological filling of these terms is but a temporary moment. What I mean here is that the terms themselves may in fact have a deeper, non-theological meaning. Theology then becomes a moment in their history, one that does not necessarily claim priority.

Will someone please explain to me what this says? I can make neither heads nor tails.

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

Jared Woodard had a great letter to the editor in response to the First Things piece -- the condescension is my main objection, but his exposition in itself is basically fine. Clearly he has read the texts attentively.

I may come back later and try my hand at that last paragraph. The last couple sentences make sense to me, but the first parts are more difficult to understand, so maybe I'm not understanding the end as well either.

[ogged]

That's a damn long article so forgive me for not reading it, but as I understand the part you quote (plus the sentence immediately preceding), the meaning is this.

Let's seek out all the ways in which theological thought has become a part of our political thought. But let's not do it just so to claim that political thinkers are deluded or arguing in bad faith, nor, conversely, so as to claim vindication for theology as prior to and fundamental to politics. Rather, let's do it because we can't get a clear view of theology anymore unless we understand the ways in which it's become part of our political thought (theology is hiding in politics, let's find it). But let's not assume that tracing our political thought back to theology means that theology is the first, originary thought. The terms and concepts of theology might themselves have a non-theological history.

[Adam Kotsko]

Sounds good to me.