Читать книгу A New Reading of Jacques Ellul - Jacob Marques Rollison - Страница 11

Why choose Jacques Ellul to examine the theological and communicative issues surrounding structuralism? Ellul, who is better known for his critical sociology of technique than for any philosophical dialogue, might seem a surprising interlocutor for this inquiry. He admittedly lacked the interest and vocabulary for profound engagement with philosophical thought.^[23] Moreover, he often expressly refused using philosophical works—he refused employing Heidegger’s thought, as he was already aware in 1934 of the German philosopher’s National Socialist affiliations.^[24] He polemically speaks of “ . . . the very great Heidegger, where everything is so profound, seductive, innovative, but who lacked the minimal lucidity to discern what national socialism was at its foundation. The several months of his adhesion to Nazism suffice for me to consider the rest of his work as nothing.”^[25]

In fact, Ellul is an excellent choice for several reasons. First, his anti-philosophical approach in no way implies ignorance of philosophy. On the contrary, Ellul’s works are full of criticisms of Sartre, references to Bergson, dialogue with Ricœur, readings of and references to Nietz­sche, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Adorno, Lacan, Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, and Foucault—not to mention his having read all of Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s works.

Second, there are important similarities between Ellul and structuralism. Both sharply criticized early and mid-twentieth-century European humanism. Many structuralist thinkers directed themselves against reigning intellectual institutions, to which they were often outsiders—like Ellul, a Bordeaux professor who often targeted Parisian intellectuals en bloc.^[26] Both Ellul and many structuralists viewed their projects as anti-philosophical, attacking metaphysical or ontological approaches, preferring to think within the confines of temporality, finitude, and limitation.

Among secondary examinations of Ellul’s work, it is fitting to mention several authors who have compared Ellul to structuralist thought. Frédéric Rognon has masterfully drawn out Ellul’s dialogue with Nietz­sche, Ricœur, Freud, and Heidegger, all of whom play important roles for structuralist thinkers.^[27] Patrick Chastenet has suggested that Ellul prefigured Deleuze, Foucault, Negri, Bourdieu, and Michel Serres.^[28] Wagenfuhr has highlighted Ellul’s use of Claude Lévi-Strauss.^[29] The late Ellul scholar Darrel Fasching, Wagenfuhr, George Ritzer, Jacob Van Vleet and I have all juxtaposed Ellul and Lyotard.^[30] Ritzer only briefly suggests a comparison; Wagenfuhr treats Ellul together with Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, coming close to a theme which I develop at length below (without the language of myth or narrative) in suggesting that “Lyotard’s narrative creates a myth of postmodernity that enables a self-justification that Ellul’s metanarrative finds both naive and dangerous.”^[31] Van Vleet writes: “Ellul agrees with thinkers like Lyotard and Foucault for the most part. However, unlike these postmodern thinkers, Ellul is convinced that the solution to our technological predicament lies in the spiritual realm rather than strictly in the political sphere.”^[32] He sees a rapprochement between Ellul and Foucault (on propaganda), Heidegger, Habermas, and Lyotard, and—unique among introductory treatments—puts Ellul alongside Herbert Marcuse and Paul Virilio, helpfully bringing Ellul into wider continental dialogue.^[33] I will return to Fasching below.

In a tribute after Ellul’s death, Stanley Hauerwas suggested Ellul’s similarity to Foucault:

The only figure I can think of comparable to Ellul’s courageous imagination is that of his fellow Frenchman, Michel Foucault. They each looked on the world with a courageous imagination that allowed them to see the world as it is without flinching. The power of Foucault’s work is undeniable, but . . . many of us had been well prepared to face the realities of which Foucault’s work directed us by the courage of Ellul . . . what Ellul offers that Foucault cannot, is hope. Such hope is not based on false utopianism, but rather resides in the very intervention by Ellul’s work through which we know God matters.^[34]

David Lovekin, treating Ellul’s theology as philosophy, joins Hauerwas to make a pair who recognize something interesting in Ellul’s use of language. Lovekin writes:

For Ellul, it is the poet using “traditional language” who holds the key, a notion that may be abstracted from the whole of his work but is found explicitly in no one work . . . In traditional language, the context is given by the community, by tradition, or by the body; in technical discourse, the word has only a systemic and contextual meaning that eschews the individual speaker or reduces words to the ravings of the merely individual, for example, to the discourse of the mad, which so fascinates many French intellectuals from Lacan to Foucault.^[35]

And Hauerwas: “I was in seminary when I read The Presence of the Kingdom. I am sure I did not understand it then and I am not sure I ‘get it’ now, but I understood enough to see here Christian language was working.”^[36]

Gilbert Vincent gives the only essay-length treatment of Ellul and Foucault.^[37] Vincent notes both the labor involved in juxtaposing the two thinkers, and their overlap. Both transcend disciplines, employ “phenomenological” styles, and reject traditional philosophy, shared radical epistemological critiques, “engaged themselves in converging progressions, not hesitating to interrogate the proud self-confidence of the modern subject . . .”^[38] Both “renounce the paradigm of the instrument, paradigm of the human grip on the world . . . to recognize a strongly disturbing novelty, that of technique.”^[39] Both are anti-Cartesians, believing that technique can alter who we are. The unclassifiable nature of both is their strength.^[40] Crucially, their respective “anti-humanisms” proceed from critiques of all “onto-theology,” decisively establishing broad commonality between Ellul’s thought and Foucault’s Nietz­schean critiques. Vincent notes that Ellul’s Barthianism allowed him a “theological anti-humanism.”^[41] For Vincent, studying Foucault adds a historical component to reading Ellul.^[42] He importantly asks whether the critiques of both thinkers overwhelm subjective freedom altogether, and also notes that Ellul precedes Foucault with something similar to the latter’s “biopower.” Finally, he notes the analytic and prophetic force of Ellul: “we should admit his intellectual power of anticipation to be among the most remarkable.”^[43]