Monday, April 18, 2005
(6:00 PM) | Brad:
On the Conference, Part Two
Okay, fuck what I said about not posting again about the conference. Since JD actually wants to hear about the its content, rather than my adventures thereabout, thus betraying the fact that he does not know me or my general hatred for conferences, I thought a few more words might be in order. Rarely do I pay attention well enough to ask a coherent question at these things; when I do pay attention, I typically stammer and spit my way through a question that leaves the speaker with their own 'who farted?' expression. Oddly enough, though, I did pay attention this time around. This says nothing, though, about my maturity as an academic, or my heightened sense of intellectual responsibility. Rather, it was the presence of Jabba the Hut and Scankodemic, of whom I write in my first post. Without them, I would be at a total loss.I will not rehearse the contents of everyone's papers. I say this mostly because if I feel qualified to say anything at all, it is about the philosophers' papers; and I can say quite definitively that neither of them (I'm exempting R. Kearney here, because I don't think anyone here cares about his hermeneutical philosophy) did anything especially different than what you might expect them to do. If you know their projects, you pretty much know their papers. It's like visiting Mount Rushmore ... or the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.
As for the others, here's quick run-down of the ones I recall off the top of my head:
1) Daniel Boyarin was one of the most explicit when it came to 'conversing' with the philosophical perspective. He had many good things to say about Badiou's purpose, if not his method of getting there. He was, needless to say, troubled by Badiou's general unwillingness to get his hands dirty with history, or at least to acknowledge its place in his philosophy. At the end of the day, however, I don't think this was Boyarin's biggest problem with Lugosi, I mean Badiou. No, I think it was Badiou's Platonism that Boyarin could not abide the most expedient way to get at their shared political goals. Cutting through a lot of the textual legwork that he did, which was all surprisingly interesting, Boyarin seemed most divided from Badiou in terms of PHILOSOPHICAL disposition. His shift into thinking Paul as Sophist, and ensuing emphasis on Badiou's neglect of history, then, seemed a little convenient; but it was at least a gesture in the direction of conversational engagement.
2) E.P. Sanders had not read Badiou or Zizek, and I can well imagine that they had not read him. Sanders clearly did not expect too many biblical studies people, because he took a couple of minutes in his talk to actually explain the nature of the Septuagint -- going so far as to point out the significance of 'LXX'. The point of his talk was to discuss how a collection of passages in Romans show Paul to be a salvific universalist; that one should not be bothered by the apostle's exclusivist, damning writings in other books, because Paul is not a systematician nor a theologian, so he can change his mind if he damn well pleases. Sanders' contributious to any conversation with Badiou's and Zizek's universalism were peripheral, which is not to say details along the way cannot be brought to bear on the conversation. Such was a task, however, in which nobody seemed too interested this weekend.
3) Karen Armstrong .... don't know. I skipped her session, opting for an afternoon strolling through campus and downtown. A friend tells me however, though he perhaps should not be believed because he was not there either, that her session was over a mere sixty minutes into it, and nobody looked especially thrilled.
4) Dale Martin, as one might have well expected if one knows anything at all about Martin, cast his lot in with Zizek and Badiou -- with the caveat that Badiou, in particular, really should not de-emphasize the significance of (Jewish) identity for Paul the way he does, or disregard the fact that Paul was not about starting a new religion. The point about identity is something that Boyarin ventured into, as well, but did not seem to sustain -- at least not to my recollection. In contrast to Boyarin, Martin did not seem bothered by Zizek's and Badiou's philosophical dispositions, and went the furthest to in trying to reconcile and/or affirm their philosophical projects with the texts they use. And yet, to be sure, his paper was also (so says my biblical studies companions) a bit shallow -- though I think this is mostly due to the fact he had anticipated speaking to a lot of philosophical students. Though, then again, I sat though a pretty shallow presentation of his in Glasgow, too. So, maybe not.
5) Paula Fredriksen spent a loooooong time talking about Origen and Augustine, and very nearly put everybody to sleep in the process. But, in the final minutes of her lecture, finally made her way around to a point: namely, that what philosophers / theologians do is to systematize texts that are not systematic; where historians find layers and layers of context. I really could not fathom a more banal observation. And yet she followed it up by saying that what philosophers / theologians do with texts is okay, so long as they announce their intentions ahead of time. And then we all snorted ourselves from our slumber, shrugged, and walked out into the sun, unaware of just what in the hell we'd done with ninety minutes of our lives.
6) I honestly do not recall much of Kearney's paper. At this point I was still fighting a wicked hangover from the evening before, wherein an evil waitress at a German restaurant gave us poor alternative directions back to the hotel, assuring us that her way was shorter. I do recall, however, he had some nice things to say about Agamben's book, followed by his typical reserations about -- i.e., for those who have never read Kearney, that it either doesn't allow for or explain the hermeneutical decision making he regards as key. He is I think, right, about decision-making; but he is so often wrong about his indictments of people he regards as lacking in the ability to make such a decision. If only he could read other philosophers as well as he can movies. If only I could've been at a movie during the final two papers!
Everyone who participated in the various Paul / immanence / blah blah debates on The Weblog will be happy to know that the conference ended pretty much where we did: at a general impasse. I will say, though, that Zizek said something that made a lot of sense, albeit to me -- it is something I think I once said on the Weblog, too, and I desire nothing but affirmation from public intellectuals who (apparently) pose for pictures naked in the trees of Slovenia. He made a very general statement, as you would certainly expect, about the dialectial dynamics of history and philosophy (in terms of this Pauline debate) -- i.e., about how the 'conversation' is predicated on the constitutive failures of both, and that basically there would be a big problem if there was (a) no historical corrective of the philosophical abstraction and (b) no philosophical abstraction of the historical corrective. In fact, this is even something that Paula Fredriksen seemed to accept, whom Boyarin applauded with surprising zeal. And yet, of course, I realize this is also inadequate to a lot of people, because it would often seem to work more in favor of philosophical abstraction than historical corrective. This is perhaps a valid criticism ... and is definitely one that Boyarin made repeatedly.
The question no one really explored was where the this 'conversation' was supposed to be headed. But ... a la Derrida, I don't guess it would be much of a conversation if it was preprogrammed.
