Оглавление
Группа авторов. Nothing Absolute
Contents
Introduction
Political Theology and the Contemporary Moment
German Idealism and the Political-Theological Diagnosis of Modernity
German Idealism between Nothingness and the World
Notes
1. Knot of the World
Notes
2. Utopia and Political Theology in the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”
Between Eschatology and Mythology
The Utopian Dialectic
Two Paths for Political Theology
The Handshake
Notes
3. Relational Division
Notes
4. Otherwise Than Terror
The Mechanics of Indifference. 1. The imposition of the modernist secular plane is inescapably violent
2. The modernist secular occupies the position of the neutral in relation to all religious positions, including atheism
3. The modernist secular abstractly expresses religions
3.1. The modernist secular is intimately linked to social and economic mechanisms of abstraction and disenchantment; hence, it possesses the potential to exacerbate them as well as to interrogate them. The modernist secular is ineluctably complicit in capital, the primary agent of abstraction in the modernist age. In other words, capital’s abstractions (e.g., from use value to exchange value) attain their artistic limit on the canvas that sacrifices sensuous individuality entirely and their religious limit in a secularity that disregards concrete traditions. Thus, just as abstract expressionist art is both an extreme form of capital and also manages to “combat social abstraction with artistic abstraction,” so too is modernist secular thinking. In other words, like the abstract expressionist canvas, secular practices have the capacity to interrogate implicit structures and de-fetishize hidden mechanisms by attentively reenacting the very moment of abstraction itself—and thus revealing (through its own abstractness) the ways in which “the concrete is no more than a mask of the abstract.”16. 3.2. It is indifferent to the concrete value, form, and content of its subject matter. Just as abstract expressionist art is cruel in its disregard for the varieties of sensuous concreteness that the subject encounters in lived experience—so too is the modernist secular. Both variants of abstract expression create “a desolate place,”17 a utopic no-place instantiated regardless of concrete particulars. Mapped out in the forest that opens Ramon Llull’s Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men and in the esoteric republics scattered through the radical utopian narratives of early modernity (including The Voyages and Adventures of Jaques Massé and A History of the Ajaoiens), this is now the idealized space of the university, of the state, or of Thomas Mann’s secular monastery which cultivates “the purest indifference” and a “strange, dislocated attitude.”18 Temporality also becomes utopian through such active indifferentiation, whether it is again the experiments with time that take place on Mann’s magic mountain, the “time without negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing withdraws into its image” of Blanchot,19 or the absolute and noneschatological time without transition of the very last of Hölderlin’s poems.20 Both spatially and temporally, the modernist secular generates its own sui generis features. 3.3. Its surface is no longer marked by specific religious traditions but emits religious phantasms. Just as in abstract expressionist art (as a result of this total abstraction from what is seen), the marks on the canvas exhibit a different order of visibility and a “specific kind of objectivity”21—so too with the secular mediation of religions. One can speak here, with Deleuze, of a perverse if “fantastic deviation from our world” where the breakdown of habits leave space for alternative processes of meaning formation. This perversion is “an extraordinary art of surfaces” and “it is perhaps at the surface, like a mist, that an unknown image of things is detached.”22. 3.4. More precisely, on its surface, religions cease to signify and become, instead, corpse-like images of themselves—such is the secular imaginary. Just as, according to Jay Bernstein following Theodor Adorno, abstract expressionist art is founded on “ideas of an enigmatic, non-signifying language … a language without signification,”23 so too religious phantasms on the secular plane are no longer signs for concrete traditions. Rather, like Blanchot’s corpse, religions here “appear in the strangeness of their solitude,” or more fully: “In the image, the object again grazes something which it had dominated in order to be an object—something counter to which it had defined and built itself up. Now that its value, its meaning is suspended, now that the world abandons it to idleness and lays it aside, the truth in it ebbs, and materiality, the elemental reclaims it. This impoverishment, or enrichment, consecrates it as image.”24 On the modernist secular surface, religions migrate “from [their] use value and from [their] truth value to something incredible—something neutral which there is no getting used to.”25. 3.5. Its images of religions fascinate as a museum exhibit does. Just as, again according to Bernstein, the abstract expressionist surface “robs the viewer of perspective and orientation with regard to it,” but nevertheless “fascinates us”26—so too for the modernist secular, to quote Blanchot once more, “fascination is passion for the image.”27 Pamuk is the contemporary writer of this museumification of the religious image. In Snow, the novel becomes a museum of religions: traditions are flattened out, losing their diachronic dimension, their eschatological promise and their historical situatedness. The novel places religious subject positions synchronically next to each other in an encyclopedic panorama or Wunderkammer (“I will build a museum, and its catalogue will be a novel”28). Snow’s protagonist wanders through traditions so as to “interpret, classify and organise” voices across space, transforming faiths into vectors and thereby performing secularity as an archive.29. Otherwise Than Negation. 4. The operation of abstraction is not a derivative mode of negation
5. The modernist secular is therefore not constituted by negation
6. The modernist secular is indifferent to specific religious differences
Corollary on the Theological Fantasy of the Secular (I)
The Destitution of the Transcendental. 7. Totalizing abstraction abstracts from its own conditions of possibility, thereby overcoming the problem of the “immune transcendental.”
8. The modernist secular is absolutely indifferent
Corollary on the Theological Fantasy of the Secular (II)
9. The conditions of possibility of modernist secularity are therefore irrelevant to immanent understandings of it
10. The modernist secular’s act of totalizing abstraction is a destitution of the transcendental as such
Notes
5. Kant’s Unexpected Materialism
Kant’s Would-be Followers and the Resilience of the Object
The Vanishing Object
A Messianic Materialism
Notes
6. Earth Unbounded
Nomosand Being
Hölderlin’s Common Earth
Günderrode and the Divine Life of the Earth
Notes
7. Kant with Sade with Hegel
The Owl of Minerva
The Rose on the Cross
The End of the World
The Voice
Kant with Sade
A Psychotic Triangle
Notes
8. A Political Theology of Tolerance
Hegel and the Logic of Tolerance
The Tragic Position of the Religious Minority
Universalism and the Possibility of Indifference
Notes
9. Hegel, Blackness, Sovereignty
Notes
10. Political Theology of the Death of God
Which Death, of Whose God?
The Perfect Gift, or the Religion of Flowers
Notes
11. Exception without Sovereignty
Notes
12. Once More, from Below
Reduplicating the Gap
The Logic of Reduplication
Kant: Regulative Ideas and Their Ontological Gap
Schelling: Reduplication in the Organic Body
Kierkegaard: Reopening the Wound—Subjectivity and Reduplication
The Different Registers of Reduplication
Notes
13. On the General Secular Contradiction
Notes
Index
Отрывок из книги
Nothing Absolute
James Bernauer
.....
Even Schelling—who in his late, so-called positive philosophy offered a “theistic” critique of Hegel’s thought as too immanentist and rationalist, instead embracing (at least according to the standard account) the transcendent God of Pauline Christianity—may be seen as wrestling, throughout his thinking, with the world of modernity and its genealogy. Already in his early metaphysics, it is the not-yet of the modern world—its negativity and alienation, its freedom as infinite striving for freedom in the future, its character of expansion and domination (over what is considered to constitute mere possibility for the subject of modernity), and the work of actualization it demands—that leads Schelling to think the absolute not as an absolutization of the world, but as an immanence that precedes the movement of negation and actualization as well as cuts through the world of mediation. For Schelling at his most subversive, the logic of the absolute and the logic of that which is nothing vis-à-vis the world, and which ungrounds the not-yet of the world, crucially coincide.36 What Schelling diagnoses is the constitutive neediness and negativity of the modern world and modern rationality, the way modernity is permeated by both a nostalgic longing and the striving for a future of reconciliation, fulfillment, and bliss—and how it is precisely its most secular forms (e.g., modern morality, subjectivity, domination over nature) that are infused with this longing and striving. The secular world is defined constitutively as the structure of lack and as the transition from an inaccessible past to a wished-for future that is, however, never now, but only endlessly deferred and foreclosed. In all this, modernity for Schelling at once inherits Platonic and Christian forms of temporality and intensifies them by making this negativity and lack, and not God, into the first, ultimate reality—an intensification by way of inversion.37
The novelty of this line of questioning, which stands at the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century genealogical inquiry—including political theology and secularization theory—must not go unnoticed. This is not merely a return of religion: after all, it was thinkers such as Friedrich Jacobi and Friedrich Schleiermacher who represented, in the post-Kantian climate, the side of religiosity. Jacobi in particular consistently opposed the German idealists (first Kant, then Fichte, then Schelling), accusing them, and modern thought more generally, of pantheism and atheism. Lamenting what he saw as the loss of faith and transcendence resulting from philosophy’s illegitimate use of religious archives, Jacobi sought to expose German Idealism’s nihilistic perversion of true religiosity. In this, his position prefigured contemporary Christian critiques of modernity—and indeed proleptically contributed to the contemporary fixation of (and on) the religious-secular binary. By contrast, German Idealism sought neither to critique modernity from the standpoint of Christianity (although some, especially the late Schelling, participated in this as well) nor to defend secular philosophy or secular modernity against its religious opponents. Both positions merely reproduce the religious-secular binary, which German Idealism, across its array of speculative explorations, sought to question and undermine. Nor should German Idealism be seen as merely a post-Enlightenment synthesis of modernity and Christianity; instead, it is precisely the original interwovenness of the two that here, for the first time, becomes the subject of an all-encompassing genealogical analysis. In this, German Idealism contributes directly to the field of political theology, whose critical and analytical power has come in large part precisely from its recognition of this interwovenness and the resulting challenge it has posed to the self-congratulatory narratives, secularist no less than religious.
.....
