Tuesday, February 01, 2005
(9:52 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Life after God
This discussion, to which I was directed by international philosophical celebrity Infinite Thought, concerns the recent disturbing acceptance of "revealed religion" in continental thought. The initial post is openly hostile toward institutional Christianity, which is completely fine as far as I'm concerned. In my comment, however, I expressed concern that those who despise all religious texts simply because they have something to do with God seem to me to be thinking about God a little too much -- not that I'm trying to say that they're secretly theists and won't admit it, any more than an American conservative who can only talk about how much he hates liberals is secretly a liberal and won't admit it. I'm just saying it's an unproductive fixation that they would probably be better off without. It might help them to see what at least some of us recovering Christians are doing mucking about in the recent scholarship on religious texts: enjoying some old familiar texts in a new way, freed from concern about what this has to do with some actual God and how he's going to approve or disapprove of what we draw from the text. I'm reminded of a quote from Agamben's State of Exception that seems to me to have captured this idea very precisely (drawing, notably, on Paul -- and Benjamin, and Kafka):One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by the law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play.It's quite irrelevant what proper church authorities would think of Badiou's reading of Paul (or Zizek's, or Agamben's, or whoever the hell else is poised to cash in), just as it's completely irrelevant what they'd think of Derrida or Lyotard's work on Augustine or what they'll think of my forthcoming work on Wesley. We "crypto-Christians" -- at least some of us -- are studying, or playing, and maybe that is part of what life after religion looks like.
