Believing in the USA: Derrida,Melville and the Great American Charlatan

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the relationship between the prophet and the charlatan, particularly as they figure in the contemporary American political landscape. It argues that at moments of democratic political crisis these figures arise and reveal the vacancy of sovereignty within the democratic model. The essay treats Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man along with Jacques Derrida’s writings on democracy and the apocalyptic tone as resources in this endeavor. It considers as well why recent worries over the status of facts in the era of “fake news” have led to critiques of deconstruction.     

A few words for Axel Vander: John Banville and the pursuit of deconstruction

The revelations about Paul de Man’s activities in Belgium during the Second World War placed him, and by extension deconstruction, on public trial. The affair gave rise to a series of novels, such as Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992) or Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming (2008), that dismiss critical theory as ethically bankrupt charlatanism. John Banville’s Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012) place the enigmatic theorist Axel Vander, a figure resembling de Man, in the dock, but these novels form no decisive judgement about his guilt. The texts reflect on memory, mourning, forgetting and responsibility, and about what writing might consign to the future, questions persistently raised by de Man and Jacques Derrida. As such, they might be said to speak to, or “inhabit”, deconstruction, rather than condemning it. This essay traces how Banville reckons with Axel Vander, and pursues the thought of de Man and Derrida, by means of three words: shroud, ash and cleave. These words at once connote concealment, destruction and separation and also preservation, survival and connection. As the discussion suggests, such words testify to the memory work performed by deconstruction.     

Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical and political critique of the contemporary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity, primarily in the later work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity derived from Heidegger and Benjamin, and we challenge this privileging of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. Messianism is contrasted with plasticity, and plasticity is shown to have resources to overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to open a creative and productive political space for a radical theological and philosophical reflection.     

Doreen Finneron and Adam Dinham (eds.), Building on Faith: Faith Buildings in Neighbourhood Renewal

Abstract

This article responds to Adam Kotsko's counter-positioning of Thomist-Milbankian hierarchy on the one hand and Deleuzian-Surinian univocity on the other as competing visions for an ontologically grounded universal socialism. Pointing to Milbank's declaration that it would be "ridiculous" to debate Christianity's universality, Rubenstein raises suspicion about the ethical and political value of universality as such. Ultimately, she points to Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of "sharing" as a means of relating existents that neither reconsolidates a static hierarchy nor abolishes transcendence. Rather, sharing "shares beings out," clearing a space for genuine debate among those who are essentially different.     

Deconstructive vs Pragmatic: A Critique of the Derrida–Searle Debate

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical account of the debate between Derrida and Searle in which I defend Austin’s and Searle’s pragmatic analysis of speech against Derrida’s complex deconstructionist approach. I first formalize Derrida’s argument, reducing it to its main tenets that can be positively identified and critically reviewed. On the basis of this formalization I argue that the apparent incompatibility between Derrida’s and Searle’s approach to language becomes clear once we formalize, according to their type and content, the three concepts of “intention” that are confusedly referred to under one and the same label in the debate. This formalization reduces and clarifies the obscurity associated with the Derrida–Searle debate, and helps demonstrating the shortcomings of Derrida’s position.     

Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding,being, and the critique of metaphysics

In many ways, the 1707 Act of Union encouraged various practices of literary nation-building and the search for authentic ’British’ voices. In their desire to assert the politeness of this newly constituted British identity, writers such as Joseph Addison, Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson shared a preoccupation with a quality which Addison termed ‘majestick Simplicity’. The implicit codification of polite manners and taste in the Spectator might at first appear to contradict this literary fascination with the search for exemplars of native British simplicity. This article explores the continuity of these concerns in the writings of Addison, Blackwell and Macpherson, suggesting some of the ways that authenticity and politeness exerted conflicting demands on the eighteenth-century literary culture of Britishness.     

Red Toryism and the Case of the Lost Revolution

Abstract

This article explores the theological commitments of Red Toryism through an engagement with the work of Phillip Blond and John Milbank. Investigating the notion of the common good in Red Toryism from ecclesiological and ecological perspectives, and making a comparison with the "long revolution" proposed by Raymond Williams, I argue that Red Toryism misses the theological potential of the long revolution. Losing this revolution presses theology without warrant towards an unnecessarily conservative construal of civil society.     

The Realization of Harmony in a Broken World: Reconsidering the Role of Ethics in Milbank's Ontology of Peace

Milbank's Christian ontology of peace indicates a way out of the contemporary crisis of Western democracies. Milbank argues that politics should have a positive and communitarian goal, and that contemporary liberalism fails insofar as it is preoccupied with the limitation of evil, and insofar as it presupposes a fundamentally egoistic anthropology. Milbank's alternative harmonizing vision of reality and humankind has been criticized for preempting all too quickly a harmony which has not yet been realized, and for thereby undermining the crucial role of reactive ethical laws and human work for the realization of true harmony in a world marred by a tragic dimension. Contrary to this criticism, this article advances the claim that Milbank pays too little attention to the ways in which real harmony is already being realized in the world, which is why he presents his ontology as an ideal toward which an entire society should work, under the guidance of ethical laws. A reading of Schillebeeckx's more positive reception of liberalism will serve to illustrate the political consequences of a position that focuses more on the already realized harmony in this world than on an ideal harmony.     

Speculative Realism and Public Theology: Explorations

Abstract

The paper argues that ideas emanating from the speculative realists can inform a new approach to public theology, one that is broadly consistent with Christian realism and opposed to that of radical orthodoxy. Linking the two disciplines through an exploration of the ethical consequences of speculative realism, it takes in particular the work of Latour, his concept of the "gathering," his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, and his questioning of the fact-value distinction, and through a lived example shows how the language of human and non-human offers a critique of reductionist approaches to the political.     

Capital Shares: The Way Back into the With of Christianity

Abstract

In the ten years since the publication of Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire, the relationship between Christianity and global capital has received increasing theological attention among the adherents, critics, sympathizersssa, and apostates of Radical Orthodoxy. At stake in this conversation is the possibility that Christianity might provide a universal ontology sufficient to ground a counter-hegemonic, specifically socialist, praxis. One question that many of these authors rarely address, however, is the extent to which Christian universalism has been responsible for the emergence of global capital in the first place. This article will address this profound split at the heart of a tradition; that is, Christianity's culpability for and resistance to global capital. To this end, "Capital Shares" sketches the aporia of Christianity's relation to Empire and then appeals to Jean-Luc Nancy's "deconstruction of Christianity"; in particular, his attempt to find "a source of Christianity, more original than Christianity itself, that might provoke another possibility to arise."     

Orthodox violence: “Critique of Violence” and Walter Benjamin's Jewish political theology

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology.     

Jim Wallis,Faith Works: Lessons on Spirituality and Social Action

Abstract

This is a response to John Milbank that further unfolds our debate published as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston Davis and published by MIT Press, 2009. My response to Milbank takes its point of departure from Pascal's wager.     

Bearing Witness: Hope for the Unseen

Beginning with an identification of the ethical and political ambivalence surrounding hope, this essay considers whether an analysis of the activity of bearing witness to truth could offer a theoretical framework for thinking about hope differently. Specifically it argues that hope can be taken as a discipline, or practice, one which is both required for, and enacted in, the act of bearing witness. Through a consideration of the process of bearing witness in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions responding to national and intergenerational trauma, the essay explores the way in which bearing witness is a fundamentally hopeful action in so far as it ceaselessly seeks to speak to the truth of an event while acknowledging the inability to ever fully capture that event in words.     

On voodoo economics: theorising relations of property, value and contemporary capitalism

This paper reflects on how we can productively theorise the contemporary treatment of property, by a range of different economic agents, as a locus for the attempted creation of economic value. Its argument is that the theorisation offered by David Harvey (1982) in The limits to capital has a continued and arguably even heightened relevance in the present-day context, but that this theorisation can be embellished with insights from the sociology of finance, particularly in regard to the power of representation. This argument is developed with reference to two parallel empirical 'stories' from early twenty-first century capitalism: the economist Hernando de Soto's influential thesis about the 'mystery of capital' and his related policy ideas; and the attempts of western-based financiers to extract profit from companies with significant real estate assets by separating those property assets from the operational side of the businesses in question.     

On food and fossils: natural philosophy,mathematics, and biblical history in the works of John Wallis

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how John Wallis (1616–1703), Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, used biblical evidence to support his ideas about natural philosophy and mathematics. Examples from Wallis’s long career include his calculation of the age of the Earth, his critique of Robert Hooke’s theory concerning the origin of fossils, and his debate with Edward Tyson about whether humans are naturally herbivorous or carnivorous. My analysis shows that Wallis’s use of biblical history did not necessarily commit him to an intellectually conservative position, but neither did it always encourage him to embrace new ideas. In fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle: I argue that biblical history provided a useful way for Wallis to negotiate between tradition and innovation, to determine which new ideas represented important advances and which were unsubstantiated follies.     

A Critique of the Metaphysics of Ontological Poesis : Responding to Theology and the Political

Abstract

A common set of metaphysical assumptions inform the theological proposals of many contributors to Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Those assumptions are orientated toward grounding the possibility of genuine ontological creativity (poesis) in a particular construal of nature's mediation of the supernatural. Applying the claims of Bernard Lonergan's early work on grace and freedom to those assumptions, the argument is made that this position repeats the most fundamental flaws of the Bañezian position in the de Auxiliis controversy: namely, a basic confusion of form with act, which gives rise to the misguided assumption that a "third" (i.e., physical premotion, causal influx, sophia) must be posited to mediate divine grace to the world and within it. It is argued that this confusion reveals that a competitive understanding of the God/world relation is presumed in this proposal, which itself is the result of a failure to affirm the absolute and immediate dependence implied by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.     

The evolution of maritime Chinese historiography in the United States: toward a transnational and interdisciplinary approach

ABSTRACT

Once considered a marginal side-story to the Fairbank-inspired narrative of an agrarian-centered, land-bound China, Chinese maritime history has received increasing attention in the United States as a research field in its own right. Through sustained engagement with trends in regional, comparative, military, and global histories, and dialogue with European and Asian academia, the efforts of several generations of scholars after Fairbank have slowly broken down his paradigm. Studies of maritime China are increasingly showing a broad, integrated maritime East Asian region comprising the seas and their littoral from the Sea of Japan to the Strait of Melaka. This article surveys the historiographical development of the field. It also highlights my work-in-progress on autonomous overseas Chinese polities along the Gulf of Siam littoral in mainland Southeast Asia during the eighteenth century as one possible future path for the study of maritime Chinese history.     

John Owen and John Locke: confessionalism,doctrinal minimalism,and toleration

ABSTRACT

The present article compares John Locke’s and John Owen’s approaches to toleration. Owen, a towering figure of the Puritan revolution and a Protestant scholastic whose work is still the object of significant appreciation in Reformed circles, was Locke’s dean during his time as a student in Oxford. There is a number of treatises on toleration by Owen, especially during the mid-1640s, and later again after the Restoration, in his role as a nonconforming divine. There has also been some speculation regarding the involvement of both Owen and Locke in the circle around Shaftesbury. Together with their writings against Parker and Stillingfleet, this would seem to draw Owen and Locke quite close to each other. Both authors are, however, divided in their approach to Christian doctrine: Owen represents classical confessionalism and Locke modern doctrinal minimalism. The article explores the ways in which these oppositional approaches to doctrine relate to their views of toleration.