Thursday, October 21, 2004
(10:05 PM) | Anonymous:
A Polemic Against the Academic Dishonesty or Willful Ignorance of the Contributors of Radical Orthodoxy.
First off you should know that I like certain aspects of Radical Orthodoxy, even if the contributors are only unified by the fact that they read Augustine and French Post-Structuralists. That being said there are a lot of problems with it, and perhaps the most flaming is academic dishonesty or willful ignorance that many of those who claim the school partake of when working with non-Christian texts.For example, albeit a blog one, James K. A. Smith, part of the ever growing Calvinist contingent within RO, has a blog that he doesn't post much on but did have this comment on Hardt & Negri's Mulititude.
Now James KA Smith is a graduate from Villanova's philosophy department, and so I would expect better scholarship (even in blog form) from him (even though he's a Calvinist who teaches at Calvin "Evangelical Christian WorldViewTM" College in Michigan (it is, after all, a good school). Still he falls into the Radical Orthodoxy trap of seeing some random Christian from the Middle Ages mentioned in a book and taking it as some sign that the whole book is really built around how amazing Christianity and the Church are. I also found Hardt and Negri's use of St. Francis interesting, but suggesting that the multitude, as presented in its Hardto-Negrian form, is led by means you didn't understand the argument. St. Francis served as a model of the militant, who resisted violence (necessary in a time like our own) and hierarchy. There is no leader of the multitude, and to say that there is makes me wonder how well the book was read.Those who read Hardt & Negri's Empire (Harvard UP) will recall their invocation of the "multitude"--led by St. Francis, as it were--as the transnational network of resistance. Well, I just got ahold of what amounts to the sequel of Empire. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin). I'm taking it along with me to Cambridge, but it looks fascinating. And ripe for theological engagement. I wonder if what Hardt & Negri are looking for from "the multitude" might be precisely what one would hope to find in the ekklesia? I would highly recommend reading this book alongside Daniel Bell's outstanding work, Liberation Theology After the End of History, in the Radical Orthodoxy series (Routledge).
Smith also falls for the all too common "ask a stupid rhetorical question" trap when he muses, "I wonder if what Hardt & Negri are looking for from "the multitude" might be precisely what one would hope to find in the ekklesia?" What "one"? Hardt and Negri? Two atheists?!? Surely not those in Asia, where the church grows the most among those with upward mobility, and thus supports Capitalism! Ok, sure, if you are a Christian you want the Church to be every-fucking-thing that is good, but you know what? It's not. It just isn't. In fact the Church, or ekklesia (it doesn't change if you say it in Greek), may be the biggest political failure of the 20th Century. Sometimes when I read those involved with Radical Orthodoxy it seems that they feel threatened by things that don't easily fit into a narrow theological framework, and so they force those new concepts into ones they are familiar with. Derrida's concept of the gift? Oh, that's really just an incomplete picture of God offering God's only son to die. Badiou's theory of truth and universality? That's really just something ripped off from Christianity. Marion's questionable phenomenology? Ok, that is just Thomistic theology with a phenomenological framework, so they win that round. But Marion doesn’t really hide that fact or pretend to be a non-Catholic philosopher, so it seems fair to use him explicitly as such.
I think Radical Orthodoxy has a lot of good things in it, the "Erotics" chapter in the so-called manifesto is a good use of Bataille for theology, some of Milbank's critique of perceived "secularization" are rather helpful in dealing with the religious nature of Capitalism, and Daniel M Bell Jr's Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering is a really interesting use of Deleuze and Foucault for critiquing Liberation Theology. So, they don't always suck, but when they do suck they really suck. I just want them to admit that "They aren't Christian," isn't a good critique of any philosopher.
