Interview with Mark C. Taylor

Professor Mark C. Taylor

This is part of an interview between Mark C. Taylor and Creston Davis upon the release of Taylor’s new and most extraordinary book, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living published by Columbia University Press. This book recounts Taylor’s “unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life.” Mark C. Taylor is one of the most respected and provocative public intellectuals in North America. He chairs the religion department at Columbia University and has written over twenty books including Erring: A Postmodern A/theology widely considered to be the best text on postmodern theology ever written.

CRESTON DAVIS: This book is wholly unlike any other book you have written. How does the genre of this text relate to both philosophy and theology on the one hand, and your own interior and irreducible singularity on the other?

MARK C TAYLOR: Having taught philosophy and religion at Williams College for many years and now at Columbia University, I had long considered writing a book that would bring together abstract ideas and the concrete experiences and dilemmas of human life in the form of a philosophical memoir. For many people, the writings of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, which lie at the heart of my academic work, are so abstract that they often seem irrelevant. Since my student days, however, I have always found that these writers illuminate questions we all ask and decisions we all face. Over the years, my intellectual life has been suspended between Hegel, who is a speculative systematic thinker par excellence, and Kierkegaard, who probes individual subjectivity with unparalleled insight.

I have written many books over the years on subjects as diverse as philosophy, religion, literature, literary criticism, art, architecture, technology, and economics. In addition, I have published artistic books, done some art and even had an exhibition, Grave Matters, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Though I did not realize it at the time, there is a coherence to all this work that has only become clear as I look back. My latest book, After God, represents an effort to integrate the many strands of my thought. It is my most Hegelian book.

Field Notes from Elsewhere is, by contrast, my most Kierkegaardian book. It is a meditation on personal experiences, friends, family, teaching and many other topics. I have also included 120 photographs that are either from family albums or that I took for the book. Rather than a continuous narrative, I tell the story in 52 chapters, each of which has an AM and a PM section. The book begins with a meditation on dawn and ends with reflections on dusk. I regard the book as a cross between a diary, a book of hours and a family photograph album. Each chapter is a three-or-four-page meditation on paired topics like: Premonitions/Postcards, Abandonment/ Mortality, Pleasure/Money, Solitude/Loneliness, Failure/Success, Imperfection/ Vulnerability, Love/Fidelity, Hope/Despair.

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom did not think I would live, worked to save my life. During the first night, I realized things could go either way but thought I was out of the woods by morning. I was not; my condition remained serious and would not stabilize for several weeks. After five days in the intensive care unit and ten in the hospital, I was released. Five months later, I underwent surgery for cancer. These experiences have changed my life in ways I still am trying to understand.

CD: Do you see your text related to Augustine’s _Confessions_ in any way?

MCT: All autobiographical writing is haunted by Augustine. His Confessions (c. 397) was the first autobiography ever written. For Augustine, knowledge of self and knowledge of God were inseparable – he could not know himself by himself but could only come to know himself through God. Obviously, this mode of self-analysis is the precursor of psychoanalysis as well as many other contemporary strategies of self-interpretation. Augustine presented his work as a prayer to God in which he asks God to show him how to understand himself. Augustine’s theological insight is not, of course, new. Why, then, we might ask did Augustine construct the narrative of his personal experience in the way that he did?

The answer to this question can be found in his understanding of the inextricable interrelation between time and the self. In books IX-X of the Confessions, Augustine presents a revolutionary account of memory and of time. He asks, “What, then, is time?” and proceeds to respond, “I believe I know what time is until someone asks me about it, then I do not know what to say.” Augustine suggests that we generally think there are three tenses of time: past, present and future, but in fact, Augustine argues, there is only one tense of time with three modalities. Only the present is real – there is a present of things present, a present of things past and a present of things to come and all three of these are held together by the mind. With this insight, what Augustine discovers is the subjectivity of time. But this is only half the story – and it is a story; the converse of the subjectivity of temporality is the temporality of subjectivity. The self, in other words, is irreducibly temporal – it has a history and that history defines the self. If the self is temporal, the only way to know the self is to narrate the history through which the self becomes itself. This is what Augustine did in the Confessions. But his analysis could not stop with his own story because his narrative is part of a much larger story. He completes his journey to selfhood by writing City of God. In this work personal history is placed in the context of the history of the world, which, in turn, can only be understood through God’s providential purpose.

My first doctoral dissertation was on Kierkegaard and was entitled, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self. I began that book with an account of Augustine’s view of time and the self in the Confessions. My second doctoral dissertation was entitled Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. In this book, I argue that Hegel and Kierkegaard present alternative phenomenologies of the self. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings reenact Augustine’s Confessions and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit extends his City of God in the form of a realized eschatology that unfolds from the time of Christ down to Hegel’s own day.

In many ways, all of my writing and teaching explores the issues raised by Kierkegaard and Hegel. After God is my most Hegelian work and Field Notes from Elsewhere is my most Kierkegaardian book. In Field Notes, as in many of my other books, I give indirect indications of points I prefer not to make directly. The book includes about 120 images in Field Notes, which are either from family photo albums or are photographs I took for the book. The last three photographs are images of a container of dirt I collected from Kierkegaard’s grave, a plant of ivy I grew from a slip I took from Hegel’s grave and a bunch of grapes, which suggests Nietzsche’s Dionysus, the Anti-Christ. Kierkegaard-Hegel-Nietzsche. That’s as close to a holy trinity as I will ever get.

I was not self-consciously thinking about Augustine when I wrote Field Notes, but, obviously, his work is never absent. I conceived the book as a combination of a diary, a family photo album and a book of hours. One of the basic questions I had to answer was how to structure the book. I did not want to write a continuous narrative in a manner reminiscent of Augustine. Life is not, I believe, continuous but is episodic – periods of continuity are punctuated by moments of disruption. As I pondered how to structure the book, I considered taking as my point of departure the Danish word for ‘diary,’ Dagbog – day book. I made up the word Natbog – night book – and thought about writing the Daybook from front to back and the Nightbook from back to front. But this strategy presented certain design problems and, more important, I decided it would not be a good idea to group all of the day entries and night entries together. I then had the idea of structuring the book like a year-long diary – there are 52 chapters each of which has an AM and a PM entry. Each entry is a meditation on a single topic – indeed, a single word.

As I have suggested, the narrative is not continuous but is episodic. There is, however, an overall trajectory to the book and the different subjects are organized in a deliberate way. The book begins with Day/Night and ends with Ordinary/Extraordinary. Day opens with a meditation of dawn breaking on the Berkshire Mountains, which I see from the barn where I write, and closes with “An Ordinary Evening in Williamstown,” which is a rewriting of Wallace Stevens’s, another ghost who haunts these pages, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Between beginning and end, the reader discovers stories of family, friends and colleagues as well as reflections on questions none of us can avoid. The last lines of are:

Weeds – but why weeds? – grown tall waiting to be mowed.

Sun, moving south, slipping below the distant tree line.

“The instinct for earth,” for Williamstown, where, unexpectedly,

“The real and the unreal are two in one.”

The truth of incarnation.

Wisdom asks nothing more

Nothing more.

Financial Crisis–One Year Hence

This is an article I published a year ago on the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory’s Blog.  A year later and no one has even challenged the idea of capitalism.  This is ideology at its best!  Capitalism really does mean–socialism for the capitalist!

Global Financial Crisis

October 04, 2008

Crisis: a liberation from capitalism?

By Creston Davis

A certain story underlines the truth of the relationship between the rich and the poor.  Set in a small farming town, a group of workers would meet every week for lunch at a local restaurant.  The men talk about anything from local politics to sports and the occasional vulgar gossip.  Lunch was always paid for by a rich man (who was also part of the group) until one day the working class men starting complaining that the tax code disproportionately favored the wealthy and unfairly burdened the workers and farmers of the town.  By the end of the meeting, the rich man got so mad that he refused to pay for everyone’s lunch.  The cliché moral of the story is that the workers committed the fallacy of biting the hand that feeds them.

But this interpretation fails to see the true reality that resides in the power of the workers (the majority of the labor force in society), a reality that Hegel rightly identified in his master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely that the power only appears to be in the hands of the master (capitalist, bankers etc.) but really resides in the hands of those who create and produce reality as such, namely the slaves (workers).  In this story, it is almost as if this group of workers could not exist until the rich man brings them together and thus brings them to “life” (appearance) out of sheer and gratuitous grace that is a fake—a mask behind which the reality of a enslavement logic lay.

The world according to the master seemingly makes the workers come into existence out of the pity in the rich man’s heart, whose gift of sustenance only repeats and reinforces the debt that the poor owe him.  The truth of the world is thus hidden from view and obscured by a false logic of debt that the workers must carry around with them in order to exist at all.  But is not the correct interpretation of this story that if and when the rich suddenly fail to pay for our lunches we are free to take what is really ours.  Are we not dependent more immediately on the work of our hands than on the rich?  In other words:  in a time of crisis we finally see the truth of the world hidden from us by the rich.  We the workers are the condition of our own possibility.

Bertolt Brecht

In this way, Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that goes something like, “There is no difference between founding a bank and robbing one”[1] needs a further twist:  There is no difference between a bank collapsing and getting robbed by one.  And is this not precisely what is happening in the United States at the moment?  The banks are rapidly collapsing one by one by one and who comes and saves the banks (who can only save a bank?) the taxpayers!  The truth hits home! Never before has such a crisis revealed the dirty trick of capitalism:  you get screwed both ways—which adds insult to injury!  When you open up a bank account and when you save a bank—either way you get the short end of the deal.  But this is the beauty of the paradox: the people finally grasp the truth of capitalism’s brutality!  And this awakening we can grasps reality and make it our own again.

Professor Carl Raschke’s article “Hyperreality” (published on the JCRT-LIVE Blog) nicely identifies the financial meltdown on Wall Street by appealing to theological and philosophical categories, which helps illuminate some basic factors in the opaque aftermath of the collapse.  Raschke shows how the attempt to get to the materialized bottom of what Fred Jameson called “the cultural [financial?] logic of late capitalism” is impossible.  Indeed one of the most frightening aspects of this meltdown (and there are several) is the fact that no one understands the full extend breath and width of the problem.  The article description of what is effectively un-describable reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction short story “The Last Question” in which human beings create a GIANT omnipotent and omniscience machine-computer in order for it to perform the mundane tasks of living (for example, redistributing energy, financial capital, maintaining itself and other sundry by-products etc.) only to discover that the GIANT machine is so enormous that it simply transcends any one’s ability to even find, much less trigger, the on/off switch.  In chillingly appropriate terms, Asimov says that “[t]hey had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole”[2]

Ominously this capitalist financial crisis rings true to one of the basic plots of science-fiction: viz. humans create a machine so big (or robots so plentiful) that it/they ends up taking over the universe only to become conscious of the unforeseen negative efforts when it’s simply too late in the game to make a difference.  Come to think of it, perhaps this basic plot that ties together the standard plot in science-fiction and global financial capital can describe the 20th century.  This provisional hypothesis is too general to prove of course—it will die the death of a thousand qualifications.   Nevertheless this hypothesis does comport with Alain Badiou’s idea that 20th century philosophy.  For Badiou understands philosophy in a triad of hermeneutic, analytic, and postmodern orientations which collectively and in their own different ways puts “the category of truth on trial, and with it the classical figure of philosophy.”[3]  And the result Badiou tells us produces two inter-dependent axioms:

1- “the metaphysic of truth has become impossible…. Philosophy can no  longer pretend to be what it had for a long time decided to be, that is, a search for truth.”
 2- “The question of meaning [language] replaces the classical question of truth.”[4]

And now, in the dawning hours of a new century we are shocked by two different Septembers, 9/11 in which the World Trade Centers are targeted and fall to their doom, and in 2008 with the financial crisis—the fallout of which is less “symbolic” and dramatic but sure to be more financially painful to more people regardless of their race, creed, and gender. On the surface, these two Septembers seem only to have a month in common, but perhaps there is something (an extreme “fundamentalist” take on life at the expense of common hard-working folks i.e., capitalist soldiers/terrorist) that ultimately connects them.

What I found most striking about Raschke’s article was not only his ability to name the unnamable, but more importantly was how he closed the article with a sign of hope.  Here are his words that blend with Jacques Derrida’s:  He with us are obliged “to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever…from opposing presence to representation, ‘real time’ to ‘deferred time,’ effectivity to its simulacrum…in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts.  It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy.  For democracy-to-come and thus for justice.” (Specters of Marx, Routledge, 1994).

It is in times such as now— in the dustbowl of the crisis’ fallout—that will inevitably change the course of history.  And, we must not be afraid to ask the hard questions, that is, to see the light of truth (however blinding it may be).  At bottom there are two basic questions:

1-    What group (or corpus of individuals) is able to determine the future coordinates given this crisis?

2-    What ethical and political guidelines will this corpus draw on and emphasis as they make certain fundamental decisions about addressing this crisis?  For example, will they lean more towards an elitist laissez-faire economic outlook or will they take into account the majority of individuals who comprise the poor, the working and the middle classes?  In other words: Will these leaders reproduce a system predicated on greed, privilege, and alienating finance (a system that is de facto broken) or one that takes as its starting point the concepts of sharing, equality, and community?

Regarding the first question, the answer is clear:  The executive and legislative branches of the government are the one’s responsible for making policy decisions.  We stand at a basic and unprecedented crossroads.  And judging from the ubiquitous nature of the lobby industry and their corresponding scandals that have rocked congress to its core, I must admit I have a pretty good idea about how to answer my second set of questions.  Power tends to want to preserve its influence and keep to itself.  I suppose then that we are left with a glimmer of hope that congress will side with the masses, with the common, and with working people. But already in saying this—by stating the fact about the elite—it does force us to ask: Are we not the ones who have the freedom to choose—it seems we are too far removed from determining for ourselves our own future, our welfare and happiness. And a crisis like this allows us to see the truth in all is horrific glory. Perhaps the most important question of all is the one that asks: How and why did we get here in the first place?  How is it that the working people of this country allow themselves to get here in the first place?

Thomas Jefferson--Revolutionary

Is not a time like this the exact time to alight with a hope in taking back what is ours irrespective of the elite (and even despite of them)?  Perhaps we need to appeal to the thought of folks like Thomas Jefferson who called for a revolution every generation.  A crisis is another word for the birth of a democracy—something that America has always promised but has yet to deliver on.  The credit is due and the truth of democratic justice can never be exhausted.

Creston Davis is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Rollins College.

[1] Bertolt Brecht’s, The Three Penny Opera

[2] I. Asimov, “The Last Question” in The SFWA Grand Masters, Vol. II edited by Frederik Pohl, (New York:  A Tom Doherty Associates Book [TOR], 2000) pg. 210.

[3] Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Desire” in Infinite Thought, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum Press, 2003) p. 46.

[4] Ibid. pg. 47.

New Hip-Hop Music-Video [pre-release] by Jesse Weaver Shipley

Jesse behind the camera

At the cafe this afternoon I ran into film-maker/academic Jesse Weaver Shipley (Assistant Prof. in Anthropology Haverford College) who recently cut a music video with M1 from political Hip-Hop underground group Dead Prez and African Hip-Hop newcomer Gibril The African!  The video shows the links between African and African diaspora.  Artists and intellectuals are linking popular culture to theoretical critique. For follow ups ring shipley.jesse@gmail.com.  Also check out his full length feature documentary on African Hip-Hop at Jesse’s webpage.  For those interested see Jesse’s recent essay on Hip-Hop in Africa entitled “The  Aesthetic of the Entrepreneur”  published in Anthropological Quarterly (Summer, 2009).

Introduction to Slavoj Zizek’s Talk, “Is There an Ethics of Psycho-Analysis?” by Roger Casey

Zizek at Rollins

Dobrodošli. I welcome you in Slovenian, the native language of one of the world’s preeminent cultural theorists, Professor Slavoj Zizek, whom it is my pleasure to introduce this evening for his talk on the topic: “Is there an ethics of psychoanalysis?” Earlier, Slavoj told me he will answer this question with either a yes or a no, followed by a two-hour period of silence. Given that you are here tonight (or to be true to Zizek: given than some symbolic order of your divided self is in attendance competing to define itself amidst a sea of otherness), I doubt if I need to introduce Dr. Zizek to you at all. He defies description. He defies categorization. He defies. An example which forever endeared him to this academic administrator: Žižek once wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

Questioned as to why a revered intellectual would essentially be writing ad copy, Žižek told the Boston Globe: “If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!” He defies. Watch him tonight as he does a high-wire balancing act on a tension rope strung between Hegelian and Lacanian towers, using a balancing pole weighted by the major figures in Marxist, film, and cultural criticism. If cultural criticism were painting, he would be its Jackson Pollock. Step back and look at the deep, rich brush stroke of each application of theoretical acrylic in his argument. His expansive intellectual canvas is mind-bogglingly interlaced, yet coherent in all its density. You must look at it. It is inescapable. Zizek is one of the few people in the world about whom I (along with many others in academia) can say, this man has changed the way I look at reality itself. Words fail me. They certainly fail the Real, Zizek argues extensively in his works. En jezik ni nikoli dovolj. One language is never enough—never enough to describe our guest. About critic Albert Murray, it was once written: “The twentieth–century is the century of Albert Murray. We are all lucky enough to have lived in it with him.” If that statement were true of Murray in the twentieth century, I would have to say that the twenty-first century is the century of Zizek. Are we really living in it? This is the fundamental question. If theory were The Matrix, Slavoj would be our Keanu Reeves. Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Welcome to Rollins, Slavoj Zizek.

My brief response (and this is my response and has nothing to do with Zizek or Casey)

In the final analysis the answer is in the affirmative–there is an ethics of psychoanalysis.  But this “ethics” is not at all straightforward; indeed the ethics of psychoanalysis goes radically against the status quo view of what ethics has become in our time, namely, “do that action that extends the capitalist market values even further.”  In other words, ethics has becomes the same thing as making profits–if the action makes a profit then it is the right action whereas if the action does not make a profit then it is rendered “morally corrupt” and thus should be avoided.  By contrast, ethics of psychoanalysis is premised on a radical anti-fetish movement of uncovering  the ideology of capitalist ethics.   In the end, this ethics engages the neighbor (even the toxic neighbor) precisely because they confront you with the abyss of total otherness.  So, this ethics of psychoanalysis is like an atheistic form of Christianity in that it is willing to go to the limit even unto death to demystify the ideology of fetishized beliefs.

John Elias took the photograph above.

Lunch with Billy Collins & Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek & Billy Collins

This afternoon Dr. Denise Cummings, Dr. Julian Chambliss and I had lunch with the poet Billy Collins and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek at the Winter Park Institute.  The conversation was fast and furious and ranged from the role and function of the poet and philosopher, to the origin of language and music and from politics in Cuba to the Gulags in Russia.  Overall it was a very enjoyable and stimulating conversation.  Thanks to Dr. Gail Sinclair for arranging this for us.

At one point, Slavoj brought up the idea of “genius.”  And then he asked Billy:  ”What kind of genius are you?”  Are you like Bach who was a genius, no doubt, but nevertheless diligently worked at perfecting his gift from 9-5 everyday?  Or are you like Mozart who simply showed up with no work and, viola….  Or finally are you like Beethoven whose genius alighted from the result of a fundamental internal struggle.

Zizek's "Silhouette"

Billy’s response was, (and I’m paraphrasing)… “I enjoy writing because it flows out of me and gives me deep satisfaction.”  We concluded, Billy’s “genius” must be like Mozart’s then.  Whereas Slavoj’s genius is like the origin of language: it is a direct result of total failures that give birth to insights that simply cannot appear ad hoc, but only emerges out of the appearances of the world precisely by getting it wrong.  Thus, we must conclude with the most vulgar form of homological analysis.

It was a good time!

From Left to Right: Julian, Billy, Me, Denise, and Slavoj

Toni Negri’s _Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin_ a short excerpt

Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin
Antonio Negri  Translated by G. Neal McTighe and Matt Harper

Forthcoming with Columbia University Press (Insurrection Series)
Pp. 15–21

Lenin and Our Generation

1. Toward a Marxist Reading of Lenin’s Marxism
This year, in three groups of lessons, along with a few interludes and appendices, we aim to arrive at an understanding of Vladimir Lenin, though without suggesting that it is possible to arrive at any sort of conclusive reading. Primarily, we compare problems that are born from Leninism with issues that arise out of today’s workers’ movement. These three groups of lessons are: first, an introduction that centers on the fundamentals of Lenin’s thought. We will follow how problems in Lenin’s political theory are developed, comparing them with how it is that we, today, handle similar problems. The second and more-focused group of lessons will instead center around the concept of organization, particularly Lenin’s thoughts about the Russian Communist Party. The third and last group puts forth, once again, the essential idea of the extinction of the State starting with, on the one hand, Lenin’s work, State and Revolution, and, on the other, the actual current condition of the class struggle and the development of the workforce’s many branches. Therefore, we have three groups of lessons and three groups of problems, which are supplemented by notes and appendices (e.g., on the dialectics of Lenin, on the Soviets, and on Extremism); three groups of lessons that are unequal in content and disproportionate in importance. Yet the desire both to think about and do that comes from reading Lenin is so strong and compelling that I believe we shall derive great benefits from this exercise.

Let us begin, therefore, with the first point: Lenin and ourselves, Lenin and the political experience of the movement today. Let us ask ourselves, what contribution has Leninism made to our theoretical and political formation? This question calls for a comparison and, as is the case with all comparisons, requires us to make a value judgment, one that may be posed in radical terms: if Lenin is still able to serve a purpose for us today, if Leninism is such that it still has value, or better, if it corresponds in some way to the modes of research and action at the heart of the class struggle; modes that we have, often spontaneously, renovated and rediscovered. Note that I say “spontaneously” not because spontaneity is our religion, but because no one in the 1950s and 1960s ever taught us the significance of class struggle. In order to respond to these questions it is necessary to trace the entire development of Leninist thought, highlighting its key points, which are: first, an analysis of capital; second, an understanding of organization; third, knowledge of the struggle against autocracy and therefore an organic understanding of the definition of the process of revolution; fourth, an understanding of insurrection; and fifth, knowledge of how socialism is constructed once the proletariat has acquired power. It will be necessary to follow this line of thinking, granting special attention not only to content but equally to the relationship between strategy and tactics, which seems the most distinctive element in Lenin’s thought. With regard to Marx, class struggle and the rise of the workforce assign a very high value (in Lenin’s thought) to the tactical moment—which is a complete enrichment of Marxist thought. Certainly, Marx’s writings on the Commune are also an example of the intellectual merit of concrete history, an example of the capacity to seize the insurrectional moment and to develop from this a theoretical vantage point. But it is also true that for Lenin, as Mario Tronti observes in his Workers and Capital,  the relationship between the theory and the practice of revolution, between the intellectual creation of a strategy and the perseverance to carry it out tactically, and above all the novel use of organizational mediation, provides a fresh, visible prominence to the entire communist position.

Let us start with a purely introductory discussion—how to read Lenin today. In doing so we shall leave aside the various critical perspectives on the matter, for they are of no importance to the official communist movement. Dogmatic temptation and opportunism are undoubtedly diversely articulated and balanced in the interpretation of Lenin that we have come to know and have specifically noted during the latest phase of theoretical development in the communist movement. Lenin has come to be the one who has said it all. The one who has sung the praises of insurrection . . . but it is also Lenin who wrote Extremism, an Infantile Disorder: a gold mine of sayings and counter-sayings in which theory takes place even in the small space between two lines.  However, in actuality, beyond dogmatic temptation and opportunism, it is true that Lenin’s thought presents a number of formal contradictions that often have considerable relevance. In knowing this, the problem for us is to understand if and to what degree Lenin’s thought might be subjected to a Marxist analysis of Marxism itself. What does this mean? It means that, in principle, Marxist authors are placed under an historical, practice-based analysis that is fundamental in order to both understand and situate their thought. With respect to his own works, Marx himself provided a number of examples of this type of Marxist science of Marxism; that is, the capacity to situate the variations and the necessary discontinuities of political analysis within a coherent structural plan. This takes place, for example, in Lenin’s writing on the Commune, wherein the original opposition to an in-depth study of the insurrectional process is able to quickly transform itself into a self-analysis, all the while participating in the process of insurrection itself. Thought is discontinuous because reality is dialectical and the movement is revolutionary and progressive.

All the same, the revolution is thoroughgoing. It still is on its passage through purgatory. It does its work methodically: Down to December 2, 1851, it had fulfilled one-half of its program, it now fulfills the other half. It first ripens the power of the Legislature into fullest maturity in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has accomplished that, the revolution proceeds to ripen the power of the Executive into equal maturity; it reduces this power to its purest expression; isolates it; places it before itself as the sole subject for reproof in order to concentrate against it all the revolutionary forces of destruction. When the revolution shall have accomplished this second part of its preliminary program, Europe will jump up from her seat to exclaim: “Well hast thou Grubbed, old mole!”

In more general terms, what this means is that one of the most salient aspects of Marxist discourse on Marxism is the assumption of its own essential discontinuity and the discontinuity of its own real referent. It is only when Marxist thought presents itself as an ideology that it displays a false internal continuity, an internal sense of derivation, a prehistory. But that is not the case: Marxist thought is only able to address the series of problems that repeatedly renew themselves; the ruling continuity cannot be other than that revolutionary subject, both dynamic and contradictory, to which it refers. Marxism is the actual continuity of a subject that itself proposes subversion as the essence of its continuity: it is only under these conditions that Marxist theory achieves material power [potenza]. From this point on, Marxism’s discontinuity acts as a negation of ideology: never a simple theoretical continuity, never a derivation, never a linear process wherein thought incites thought; it is instead always a rupture and renovation of political hypotheses regarding necessity, requirements, and new qualifications that the revolutionary subject presents. Any reading or criticism of a Marxist writer cannot be anything but praise of real discontinuity acting as the only systematic and continuous point of reference to Marxism.

Therefore, if we place Lenin under analysis, the first and greatest danger is that of entering into a discussion on “Leninism.” Leninism doesn’t exist, or better yet, the theoretical affirmations contained in this term must be brought back to the series of behaviors and attitudes to which they refer: their correctness must be measured in the relationship between the emergence of a historical subject (the proletarian revolution) and a series of subversive problems that this subject has at times in front of itself. Is this an overly drastic reduction of the historical depth of Lenin’s thought? I do not believe so, for there are valid reservations with regard to this topic. As a confirmation and example, I would like to use the discussion that Lukács, in his article from 1924, proposes about Lenin. Lukács asks himself: Who is Lenin? He begins to answer with this line of reasoning:

Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution. It is so because its essence is an intellectual synthesis of the social existence which produces and fundamentally determines the proletariat; and because the proletariat struggling for liberation finds its clear self-consciousness in it. The stature of a proletarian thinker, of a representative of historical materialism, can therefore be measured by the depth and breadth of his grasp of this and the problems arising from it; by the extent to which he is able accurately to detect beneath the appearances of bourgeois society those tendencies towards proletarian revolution which work themselves in and through it to their effective being and distinct consciousness.
Historical materialism—that is, the ideas of the theorists of historical materialism—must therefore be measured within a determined existence of class, in its presence, exactly as in its tendency. Now, Lenin is this: he is the fullest representation of that which Lukács calls the “actuality of the revolution.”
However, there are today only few who know that Lenin did for our time what Marx did for the whole of capitalist development. In the problems of the development of modern Russia—from those of the beginnings of capitalism in a semi-feudal absolutist state to those of establishing socialism in a backward peasant country—Lenin always saw the problems of the age as a whole: the onset of the last phase of capitalism and the possibilities of turning the now inevitable final struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat in favor of the proletariat—of human salvation.

Lenin is the actuality of the revolution. Lenin interprets—within the definite situation, within the definite relationship of class between a historical subject (the Russian proletariat) and the overall capitalistic power [potere] structure placed before him—the entire series of problems that the worldwide proletariat faced in that historical moment. In a Marxist sense, the abstract becomes concrete, that is, the sum of all real definitions. The Leninist solution to the problem of the revolution in Russia is not, therefore, a solution that is simply connected to the definition of the relationship (between the revolutionary Russian proletariat and the semi-feudal condition of the relationships of production and control). But as much as it is such, and only in as much as it is such, it is also the solution to an overarching problem: analysis, interpretation, and practical solution determined by a relationship of class and overall contribution, general to the construction of the revolutionary project for all situations, in the given epoch. The passage toward the last phase of capitalism is the possibility of turning the struggle (“the fatal moment of this nation”) between autocracy and proletariat in favor of the proletariat—of salvation for all humanity.

I believe that this Lukácsian position is correct and profoundly Leninist. In reality (as we shall see in future conversations discussing Leninist texts on the subject) this sense of exactness, of concreteness of the situation that we have before us, this application of Marxist science as the choice of a defined relationship, formed upon defined relationships of force, constitutes the fundamental reduction that Lenin performs and imposes upon the Marxist science of that period; winning this theoretical battle resulted precisely in the construction of the Bolshevik party and determined the October Revolution. And so we see that the choice of a specific relationship of force between the working class and capital in a certain historical moment and, consequently, the choice of organization (inasmuch as awareness of this relationship and of the series of nexus and articulations that begin with and point to this relationship) form the basis of the reversal of political praxis. This choice of the organization as subject and the overturning of praxis is a sectarian choice. In particular, it is a point of view that is not put forward simply to define the relationship that from time to time spans working class and capitalist force, but that simultaneously desires the capacity to distort the relationship upon which it is constructed, to identify in every moment the possibility of putting the adversary in crisis, to bring to ruin its instruments of control, the possibility of setting in motion the violent destruction of these mechanisms. The theory is articulated in an absolutely precise manner with the capacity to exercise violence. Violence is the fabric upon which all political relations are constructed. The State’s dominion is that of the control of violence, of legality, of all constitutional forms—the normal forms of capitalist command are purely and simply violence. Marxism is the discovery that violence lives not simply in formal actions, but in everyday actions of production and life; it is the discovery that the science of capital is the science of capitalistic violence, it is one of the ways in which capital organizes its violence upon its subordinates. Marxism, therefore, is destruction and overthrow. Returning this relationship between knowledge and violence directly into the analysis of class represents the sectarian point of view, the viewpoint of the working class, the point of view of Marxist theory.

From this point of view we must immediately declare as unsatisfactory several other trends in Marxist theory that attempt to expunge the definition of the proletariat subject from their analyses. Louis Althusser’s position is typical in this regard, which, in the same measure, tends to define theory as a practice of intervention and a taking of a position of class,  insistently refuses to ascribe these activities to a material subject, characterized by an internal dialectic between subjectivity and material discontinuity, between the various elements that compose it. The science of the revolutionary process refuses here to become the science of the revolutionary subject. It is easy to understand the effects on this concept: exalt the reflection and the mediation (from time to time either by the intellectual or by the party) against the dialectical immediacy, and therefore against concreteness (understood in a Marxist sense) of the revolutionary subject. But how can this concept presume to be Marxist and especially Leninist when in Lenin—as we began to see and as analysis will make clearer—the fundamental problem is that of the definition of the revolutionary subject and of its temporal and spatial constitution? It becomes clear that establishing the party is quite different from dreaming about it!

Antonio Negri is widely considered to be one of the greatest living political philosophers. Negri lives in Italy.

G. Neal McTighe is based with Duke University Press and Matt Harper is based with Loyola College Maryland

On Paul–Ward Blanton & Creston Davis

ON PAUL IN RECENT PHILOSOPHY[1]

The Conversion of St. Paul

On the face of it, it seems really bizarre for atheist philosophers to be obsessed with Paul.  Indeed, like Hegel these philosophers are particularly interested in Pauline experiences or proclamations of time, subjectivity, and above all the cataclysmic event that transforms the normal (fake “universal”) logic of the world.  Moreover, like these earlier thinkers, more recent philosophers have wondered whether these Pauline topics may be formalized, decontextualized, or abstracted in order to provide exemplary models not of a specifically religious experience (in the Protestant Liberal sense) so much as a model of time, subjectivity, and the political event.

There are three main figures responsible for the return of Pauline motifs within contemporary continental philosophy: Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek.[2]

Badiou--by The Dooper

For Badiou, Paul is a perfect model or mouthpiece by which to explicate Badiou’s entire philosophical system and political hopes.  In Badiou’s formalizing version of Paul, the apostle is one who remains faithful to the unprovable (and properly speaking, impossible) event of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, allowing this event to call into existence a communal boundaries deform traditional identitarian limits.  Precisely because it undoes these usual identitarian boundaries (“in Christ is neither Jew nor Greek”), the apostolic proclamation constitutes an open-ended address whose potential is not reducible to identity politics.  What’s more, this rupture that the Christ Event announces cannot be accounted for by the means of the accepted coordinates of the world.  The Incarnation literally shocks the world off kilter the wake of which resists total comprehension.

Over against Badiou’s Paul, Giorgio Agamben tries to show that Paul does not function as the purveyer of a universalistic address over against ethnic particularity.  Rather, Paul opposes a simple distinction between Jew and Greek to a more fundamental distinction between flesh and spirit.  As this distinction is more fundamental, however, it cuts across (and divides once more) the distinction between Jew and Greek.  What follows from this model is a whole series of divisions that can never fully catalog the Pauline remainder (or “remnant”) that itself threatens to undo all ethnic distinctions and all universalistic overcoming of ethnic particularity.  In a shrewd reading of 1 Corinthians and Romans, Agamben links this notion of the Pauline remainder to the way Christ’s “remnant” renders all categories of law inoperative.

In this fashion, the profound thrust of the Pauline legacy is not so much a question of the undoing of ethnic law that leads to the introduction to a new revolutionary order of Love, as it was in Badiou.  Rather the profundity of the Pauline legacy, Agamben suggests, is to proclaim a deadlock or suspension of the dialectic between law and guilt that renders the dialectic inoperative.

These two versions of Paul are important to understand not only because each supports a very different ethico-political project:  for Badiou the system is defined by its revolutionary possibility, whereas for Agamben, Paul embodies a “postmodern” logic of illimitable differance whereby truth is sacrificed for political indifference.  One might even risk the formulation that, in Badiou’s system, Paul becomes a revolutionary hero, while, in Agamben’s, Paul becomes a liberal ironist.

Zizek

Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Paul introduces a twist:  For Žižek, Paul is the revolutionary figure, but instead of offering the truth of the world in Christ’s resurrection, that “truth” is now only carried on by the believers, the Church.  Reading Paul in a Hegelian tradition of the death of God, Žižek finds in Paul a system where God, in Christ, truly dies on the cross, with the power of resurrected life appearing only in that community that organizes itself around this divine death.  Thus, Christianity is anything but a simple overcoming of death, this limitation remaining fully intact for Žižek’s Paul.  Pauline Christianity is left to become that community fully committed to a truth that can never arrive (as if God had not died or the messiah fallen into Roman hands), but that nevertheless perpetually haunts every culture as an excess that it desires to attain.  In political terms, it is this kind of Christianity, whose potential Žižek identities with the position of the psychoanalytic critic of culture, is neither traditionally Leftist nor content with the idea that contemporary global capitalism represents humanity’s attainment of a kind of messianic end of history.  Zizek’s idea of St. Paul will be fully expressed in the forthcoming book that he co-wrote with Creston Davis & John Milbank (Brazos Press).

From one of Christianity’s principal founding figures, three different philosophical and political perspectives emerge:  revolution, political indifference, and an endless journey for the Real that remains impossible to realize.   The encounter with this principal figure by secular philosophers invites an engagement with contemporary Christian theology, not only because these new “Pauls” frequently challenge what passes for a contemporary Christian version of Paul, but also because it challenges Christianity to take up some of the radical implications of this founding Christian thinker.  In the writings of these thinkers, after all, Paul functions as a kind of last ditch effort to imagine a political “Event” that does what traditional Leftist philosophy can do no longer, ground a break with the logic of global capitalism.  The sheer weight of what one is tempted to call faith in Pauline thought, as it drives forward these ostensibly secular receptions of the Christian legacy, generates significant paradoxes.  Who is on the inside or outside of  Christian identity here?  What does it mean for contemporary Christianity that some of the most searching, not to mention theoretically and politically relevant, readings of its texts are thus arising from thinkers who designate themselves to be “outside” of this tradition?  Is Christianity experiencing, in short, a Pauline moment of its own, when the radical implications of a religious tradition seem intolerable to most of the religious community itself, evoking from that community a disavowal of those who, unexpectedly, become fascinated with these same implications?

Ward Blanton is Lecture in New Testament Studies at the University Glasgow and the author of the award winning book Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity and the New Testament published by the University of Chicago Press.

Creston Davis is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Rollins College.  He has co-written a book on Paul with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek forthcoming with Brazos Press.

---

[1] This post is informed by Eleanor Kaufman’s recent arguments about Badiou and Agamben and Paul in her article, The Saturday of Messianic Time.  South Atlantic Quarterly Winter 2008.

[2] Mary-Jane Rubinstein writes about Nancy “he is the first significant post-Heideggerian to reopen the question of ontology (rather than defer to ethics, or to literature, or to deferral), and that he does so by retrieving what he thinks to be a strand of thinking that Heidegger opened up only to cover over. That is, he retrieves the Mitsein of the first sections of Being and Time over against the purportedly “nonrelational” being-toward-death with which it ultimately rests. In a different context, one could see Nancy as reviving the ancient Madhyamika teaching of sunyata (emptiness) and pratitya-samutpada (codependent origination): the inessentiality of all that is amounts to their irreducible interrelation.”

World Renowned Philosopher and Theorist to Visit Rollins College

Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic will visit Rollins College September 26-29. He will give two public lectures.

Public Lecture: “Zizek and Film: A Theorist’s Commentary” in the  Bush Auditorium 7PM–Monday, September 28th

Public Lecture: “Is There an Ethics of Psychoanalysis?” Tuesday, September 29th in Tiedtke Concert Hall  7PM

Zizek will be a guest in my “What is ‘Truth’?” class on Tuesday, September 29th at 9.30 AM in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum

Zizek’s visit is sponsored by the Winter Park Institute.

Slavoj Zizek Discussing Our Book At Harvard

The Monstrosity of Christ

Here is Slavoj Zizek discussing the book The Monstrosity of Christ we did together with John Milbank and is published by The MIT Press.  Slavoj is at The Harvard Bookstore.

New Book On St. Paul, Liturgy, and Political Theology by Brazos Press

Slavoj Zizek, John Milbank and I have co-written a book (with a brilliant chapter added by Catherine Pickstock) on St. Paul, the Liturgy, and Political Theology (forthcoming by Brazos Press) This book’s basic thesis is that the Church (especially in the United States) has completely lost the radical edge of Christianity that both Jesus and St. Paul announced and in the wake of which the Church was founded by the work of the Holy Spirit.      Instead, the Church has more and more appealed to an indifferent and consumeristic outlook that neutralizes a politics of the Event of Incarnation.  St. Paul’s view of the Cross and Resurrection, this book argues, keeps alive a “subject of the Incarnational Event” that lives faithfully into the cosmic irruption.  The logic of the Earth-Shattering Event is precisely what the Church has lost and replaces the radical politics of Love for the status quo.  Consequently, the Bible and Church teachings too have been held captive to this the politics of indifference premised on keeping the Church “clean” from the stranger and the sinner–making it feel more comfortable and materially empty.  So, in the final analysis this book re-focuses the Church’s need to resist a postmodern politics of indifference to the status quo and challenges the Church to embrace a politics of Love in the wake of the Incarnational Event of Christ’s death and resurrection.

John Milbank

Slavoj Zizek

The thesis will unfold in the following ways:  First Zizek, Milbank, and Davis clarify the thesis in the Introduction.  Then, Zizek (a militant atheist) spells out the very meaning of St. Paul (with and against Alain Badiou).  Next, Davis will link up Zizek and Badiou’s idea of Paul by arguing for a subtractive movement of irruption that rekindles the radical nature of the Event in the Christian subject.  Milbank then will engage the meaning of Biopolitics and how this relates to the Church’s past, present and future.

Catherine Pickstock

Pickstock grounds this thesis in the very act and practice of liturgy–the worship of the One true God.  Finally, Zizek argues for the future of Christianity in relation to the work of the Holy Spirit.

This book will be available in about a year.