Monday, May 10, 2004
(7:15 AM) | Anonymous:
Religion without organs: A fragmented response to Adam Smith
First off, hello, sorry I haven't made good on the posts that I promised but it's been very hard to find a computer here that has an American keyboard and the price of the internet is pretty high as well. That being said, I think The Weblog and The UWC has held up just fine with my absence and it seems as though Adam is trying to get rid of me.I'm going to attempt a response to Adam Smith's recent post at The H is O and since I'm lazy and racing against the clock it won't have the organization of Mr. Smith's post. I suggest you deal with it.
There has been important work done in studies of ideology as it relates to religion by thinkers as diverse as Hauerwas, Zizek, Foucault, Weber, those Dutch people Adam Smith reads, and Derrida. I don't want to suggest that all of these thinkers have it wrong, we can indeed say that there is a correlation between religious systems and ideological systems, but I am not sure that it is clear that religion, in these cases, is anything different from a metaphysic. For that matter I'm not sure that the idea of world views is different from a metaphysic especially as the Evangelical Christians use the term. But I digress. In Adam Smith's thought there is implicit understanding that there are master signifiers (Lyotard says meta-narratives but this word has lost meaning to Evangelicals) but what is implicit in his thought concerning the nature of Religion other than that Religion functions as the master signifier of master signifiers. There is a religious overtone to all thought, since there is a religious dimension in our unconscious knowing. We all have a God, better to recognize Him than be impious. However, what makes this God worth being worshiped? Worth being alive other than that it engenders our life with some meaning, but, since we know there is no way to prove God exists, there is no meaning behind that God. We have seen this path before it was called nihilism.
What is not being taken into account in this understanding of worldviews is the supposed necessity. Why do Adam Smith and many of the people who work out of ICS not ask this question? If someone claims to not have a worldview they are wrong, they lack a "god" and thus lack any kind of foundation in the world. If we accept that Kristeva and others are right and that pyschoanalysis is the secular (though perhaps not unreligious) form of Christianity does that mean that our Trinity parallels the blatant modalism of the Oedipus complex (Daddy-Mommy-Me to our Father-Spirit-Son but the real God of Oedipus lies behind just as the real God of all religion lies behind these modes)? Isn't this modalism just another way of saying we believe in one God that we all basically believe in? After all we search the same way our God/Oedipus does, with unrelenting passion. Oedipus is the philosopher-king of Plato, he visits the oracle of Delphi and worships the same god to whom Socrates piety is given. In this understanding of religion as behind everything how is a/theism (Christian, Jewish, Islamic or otherwise) any different from the pyschoanaltics imposing the model of Oedipus as self on everyone? To abuse a quote from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, "Is the schizophrenic [religious or not] sick [lacking in piety] and cut off from reality because he lacks Oedipus [God, a master signifier], because he 'is lacking' in something only to be found in that God, the one behind Daddy-Mommy-Me - or on the contrary is he sick by virtue [strange choice of words] of the oedipalization he is unable to bear, and around which everything combines in order to force him to submit." Are worldviews as such imposed or natural? If they are imposed then there is an ideological behind this, we now risk an infinite regress.
For religion to be more than just an "opiate of the people" like all master signifiers - which we may all have but why? - then we must find a religion which resists being part of the dialectic of Religion. [r]eligion as we find practiced in Jesus Christ and certain other immoralists resits the allure to power which Religion participates in. We do not find in the case of the Religion of neo-conservatives (a Marxists, certain Marxists) a powerless Religion but a powerful, transcendental (which always means restricted and protected) since which undergrids all power. If we allow this definition to hold than the Christian Church, the poor dying thing, is just another part of the Dialectic. However in the person of Jesus Christ there is a sense of emptying of any power as traditionally understood. To understand religion in the way which Strauss (and thus Bush) is to let them set the rules of the game. Better phrased, this would be to allow those with power to decide the way in which we will view the world, to always only be merely religious as opposed to faithful. A Trinitarian approach is essentially a schizophrenic approach to religion, there is no view of the world but rather an engagement, "How do I view?" but "How do I live?"
One final thing Mr. Smith must deal with is what he means by God. For all those who deal with religion (and it's intersections) the question of "What (who, how, when, and the most terrifying why) do I love when I love my God?" What does this mean? What can it possibly mean?
