Tuesday, August 24, 2004
(10:19 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Ruminations: Thesis
Toward the end of last semester, I settled on a thesis topic: the political charge of Christianity in contemporary thought. My proposed method is an investigation of three prominent thinkers who have addressed Christianity at some length: Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, and John Milbank. The basic position of each seems to me to be as follows:- Jacques Derrida views the process of globalization (Fr. mondialization, world-ization; or Derrida's neologism, mondialatinization, world-latin-ization) as in large part a dissemination of Christian categories into the political sphere, even in countries where Christianity is not a dominant tradition. This "Christianity without Christianity" does not seem to him to be inherently good or bad; the task of thought is to find strategic moments when a just call for justice can be heard. Thus such Christian (and, more generally, Abrahamic) themes as the gift, forgiveness, etc., occupy much of his attention in his later work.
- Slavoj Žižek sees our current, "postmodern" age as dominated by a kind of New Age/neo-pagan obscurantism. He detects in early Christianity, particularly Paul, the tools necessary to critique and cut through that obscurantism in order to build a polity based on a truth-event. Although he does not see a great deal of potential in the empirical church (at least in his writings published so far -- his collaboration with the Radical Orthodoxy movement may change things), he argues that a "repetition" of the Pauline impulse is what is necessary in our current circumstances. Marxism should acknowledge its Christian roots through a materialist reading of Christian texts, from the letters of Paul to the writings of Chesterton. (As a sidenote that I may or may not address in my thesis: although Žižek is dismissive of Hardt and Negri in Organs Without Bodies, reading the Hardto-Negrian corpus together with Žižek's "Christian" writings, particularly The Fragile Absolute, seems to me to be a very productive, indeed crucial, theoretical move. In addition, his affinities with Robert Jenson should be highlighted -- I already did that in my paper on Žižek's trinitarianism, but there is much more work to be done on that front.)
- John Milbank sees the contemporary world as dominated by the nihilism of secularism. For Milbank, the only possible participatory, just, and pluralistic polity is an ecclesial polity. Although he seems to want to go backward to Christendom, in reality he wishes to use the resources of the medieval political experience in order to build a new "liturgical global polity" as the only way to embrace difference without simultaneously descending into the endless agonism (combat) that characterizes every facet of the modern capitalist order.
Hardt and Negri's use of Christian illustrations and thought-structures, though suggestive, does not seem to me to be explicit enough to fit well into this project, except perhaps in a lengthy footnote of some kind. And though I could obviously include Badiou rather than Žižek, Badiou's explicit writing on Christianity seems to me to be limited to the book on Paul (correct me if I'm wrong, Badiou-fans), and besides, I don't know Badiou well enough to feel comfortable incorporating him into a capstone-type of assignment -- I feel as though the thesis should encapsulate what I've worked on at the graduate level thus far, and Žižek, Derrida, and Milbank (especially Žižek) seem to be the best choice in that regard. I am still planning on writing my Badiou-and-Wesley paper for the Wesleyan Theological Society, pending its actual acceptance; thus, a future paper on Badiou and Hardt and Negri's more impressionistic use of Christian ideas and the possible resonances of their thought with Christian categories that they don't explicitly acknowledge might be possible. (In fact, after taking Ted's Romans class next semester, I was thinking of taking on a Romans-and-Multitude project.)
Another possibility that occurred to me this weekend was to just scrap my whole idea and do my thesis as a general analysis of the Hardto-Negrian corpus. From a careerist perspective, that might be a good idea as it would put me on the cutting edge; however, that opens me up to the same possibility of producing unforgivable hackwork that I am trying to avoid by not including Badiou directly in my thesis.
(On a related front, this weekend it occured to me that I don't have a writing sample that seems appropriate to submit with an application to a comp lit program, with the possible exception of the Derrida paper I just finished. That was discouraging, especially given that I can't really think of a topic on which I could "whip up" a paper. I think that if I could do the kind of work that I discuss in this post in a theology department, then perhaps a theology department would be right for me after all.)
[This post was a direct response to Robb's request that something intelligent be posted to The Weblog.]
UPDATE: Alternatively, I could write my thesis on Walter Benjamin -- there are only a few pieces of background information I would need to master first.
