This week with Rowan Williams

Lots of good stuff from Rowan Williams over the past week or two. He gave a very fine public lecture on the Philokalia at St Vladimir's Seminary (well worth listening to the whole thing). He has a video message to mark the beginning of Lent. He writes in The Guardian about the abyss of individualism. And in the new issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology 17:2 (2010), he has a rip-roaring good review of Luigi Gioia's important new book, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate (Oxford UP 2009). The review begins:

"Too many theologians writing about Augustine in recent decades have fallen under the malign spell of Olivier Du Roy's substantial monograph of 1966 on faith and intelligence in Augustine's Trinitarian thought – an essay which argued in detail for an almost unqualified Platonism and individualism in Augustine generally, and an isolation of his Trinitarian theology from the economy of salvation. Du Roy's book, along with a somewhat misread passage in de Régnon's studies in the history of Trinitarian theology, produced a curious 'received wisdom' about Augustine as the source of all the theological ills of Western Christendom or even Western society; he appears to have been responsible for everything but the common cold."

Incidentally, the same issue of RRT includes Thomas Cattoi's incisive review of Giorgio Agamben's latest, Il Regno e la Gloria:

"Yet, it is true that, in this volume at least, Agamben offers few, if any, suggestions as to how the subject could break out of the spell of glory. Angels and bureaucrats conspire to make oppression ordinary, and even aesthetically pleasing; any capacity of resistance to the kingdom is shattered, as glory reasserts its transcendent and immutable character. Those readers who persevere to the end of the volume must wait for the next installment to receive their reward."

For more on Agamben's book, you can't go past Adam's invaluable synopses.

Introducing Giorgio Agamben: what is an apparatus?

I recently mentioned Leland de la Durantaye’s new critical introduction to Giorgio Agamben – a book which I’ve found extremely valuable and insightful. But if you’re not already familiar with Agamben’s works, you might find Durantaye’s 463-page volume a little intimidating. If you’re looking for the quickest, easiest, most accessible introduction to Agamben’s thought – an introduction that you can get through in a single hour – then there’s no better guide than Agamben’s own latest book (a tiny but potent 56 pages), What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford UP 2009).

This first essay, “What Is an Apparatus?”, provides a wonderfully concise snapshot of Agamben’s entire recent project, his “theological genealogy of economy” (8). In this little essay, Agamben uses Foucault’s concept of the apparatus to classify all beings in two groups: “living beings”, and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured”. In theological terminology, these two classes denote an ontology of creatures on the one hand, and on the other hand the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern these creatures (13). Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and apparatuses.

This concept of the apparatus reflects Foucault’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity. Apparatuses are not a mere accident; they are “rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ that made ‘humans’ out of … Homo sapiens” (16). They are not instruments of violence, but of governance and subjectification. The apparatus is thus always something that produces its own subject. But the current phase of capitalism has witnessed a proliferation of new apparatuses to capture every moment and facet of life; and these capitalist apparatuses subjectify only by desubjectifying (just as, for Foucault, the penitential subject is constituted through its own negation). In any case, our formation as subjects is always a process of interruption by which the apparatus separates us from our immediate relation to our environment.

Fundamentally, such separation is religion. Religion takes things from the domain of common use and places them in a separate sphere; religion consecrates. The situation of our time demands a new politics of profanation, where that which has been separated/consecrated is restored to common use. In this way, “profanation is the counter-apparatus” (19). Our capitalist world has become “a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia”, in which apparatuses “assume the legacy of the providential governance of the world” (23). These apparatuses can be resisted – we can intervene in their process of subjectification – only through profanation. It is profanation which brings to light “the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics” (24).

It’s a splendid little essay (the volume also includes essays on “the friend” and “the contemporary”). I’ve never come across such a concise, lucid, programmatic statement of Agamben’s project.

This essay also makes it very clear that all Agamben’s recent work on theological economy is structured at its deepest level by Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity (not to mention Foucauldian concepts like archaeology, genealogy, biopolitics, etc) – even though figures like Benjamin and Schmitt sometimes linger nearer the surface of Agamben’s texts. As Agamben himself remarked in a recent interview: “I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault” (cited in Durantaye, 209).

The art of citation

Recently I was talking with some friends about the problem of citation in contemporary theological writing. We bemoaned the disturbing rise of block-quotes in much current writing: the tendency merely to cite large chunks of (presumably transparent and authoritative) text, instead of trying always to speak in one’s own voice, while reserving the apposite citation for particular strategic purposes.

Anyway, Leland de la Durantaye’s excellent new book on Agamben includes a discussion of Agamben’s notion of “the art of citing without quotation marks” – an idea derived from Walter Benjamin. Durantaye writes (pp. 145-46):

“Benjamin had a singular relation to citation. He once wrote that the ‘craft of the critic’ required a ‘theory of critical citation’…. In his One-Way Street, he informed his readers that ‘citations in my work are like armed thieves who emerge suddenly and rob leisurely strollers of their convictions.’ He thus uses citations strategically; they are part of the guerilla warfare he wages against the preconceived notions of his reader…. To cite without quotation marks is to offer the idea without the imprimatur of an author or authority. This requires of the idea that it stand or fall on its own merits and not find automatic support from its lineage. Elsewhere in The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares citational footnotes to bills slipped under the garters of women for hire. His sensitivity to the less reputable sides of citation was particularly keen.”

Giorgio Agamben, theology and economy: Il Regno e la Gloria

Adam Kotsko (author of a new book on Žižek, which I’ve just finished reading) has been working through Giorgio Agamben’s latest book, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo [The Reign and the Glory: A Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government]. You can see a list of the posts here, or you can download the full series as a pdf.

For those of us who don’t read Italian, this is an extremely helpful and remarkably fascinating chapter-by-chapter summary. From the sounds of it, Il Regno e la Gloria is Agamben’s most theologically sophisticated work to date. He engages with theo-political thinkers like Schmitt and Peterson, as well as theologians like Barth, Moltmann, Balthasar, Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, the Cappadoccians, the Arians, and St Paul.

Summarising Agamben’s argument, Kotsko writes: “Agamben’s goal in the book is to investigate the ways that power in the West has tended to take the form of an oikonomia. This aligns his project with Foucault’s, though Agamben hopes to show that there were internal reasons that Foucault’s project remained unfinished. His angle will be an investigation of the initial attempts to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of a divine economy and to show ‘how the apparatus of the trinitarian oikonomia can constitute a privileged laboratory for observing the functioning and articulation – both internal and external – of the governmental machine’…. The key question, missed by previous scholars of royal pomp and liturgy, is why power needs glory. Though this question has been neglected for the most part, Agamben believes it points toward the relation between oikonomia and glory as ‘the ultimate structure of the governmental machine of the West’. Glory is ‘the secret center of power’.”

Here’s the full index of posts:

Introduction
1. The two paradigms
2. The mystery of the economy
3. Being and act [Essere e agire]
4. Kingdom and government
5. The providential machine (translation of “threshold” to this chapter)
6. Angelology and bureaucracy
7. The power and the glory
8. Archeology of glory (threshold)

Appendix: The economy of the moderns
1. Law and miracle
2. The invisible hand

And to whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts from the series:

From the notes on chapter 1: “Schmitt’s famous thesis that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts has to be stretched to its breaking point by the notion of oikonomia. It’s not simply a matter of extending the thesis to include economic concepts as well – it’s the more radical move of claiming that the theological concepts already were economic concepts, all along.”

From the notes on chapter 8: “Agamben begins by castigating Hans Urs von Balthasar, who has led astray all theologians by confining glory to the aesthetic realm rather than its properly political place – and this despite the obvious clue provided by the German word Herrlichkeit. By contrast, Agamben sets out to prove that the terms kabod and doxa (glory) are actually never used in an aesthetic sense in scripture, but only in a political one.”

Again, from chapter 8: “Glory as inoperativity is necessary to the exercise of power because of the constitutive inoperativity of humanity. It is because humans don’t have a ‘use’ or ‘job’ that we are enabled to be so incredibly active. Just as the theological apparatus needs the central void of glory to function, so also ‘the governmental apparatus functions because it has captured in its central void the inoperativity of the human essence’.”

Agamben on transcendence and evil

“The transcendent, therefore, is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing. God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity. Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things. With respect to the these things, however, the good is not somewhere else; it is simply the point at which they grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch their own non-transcendent matter. In this sense – and only in this sense – the good must be defined as a self-grasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to itself.”

—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 15.

O Roma felice! O Roma nobile!

I have only three things to say about this conference: Oh. My. God.

To get you in the mood, here’s a stirring passage from Giorgio Agamben: “The Pauline decomposition of messianic presence is similar to the one in Kafka’s extraordinary theologoumenon, in which the Messiah does not come on the day of his arrival, but only on the day after; not on the last day but on the very last day…. I found a perfect parallel in an Islamic text that reads, ‘My coming and the hour are so close to one another that the hour of my coming risks arriving before me.’ The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable. For this reason, each instant may be, to use [Walter] Benjamin’s words, the ‘small door through which the Messiah enters’.” (Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 71)

And – I can’t help myself – here’s a passage from Jacob Taubes: “I contend that this concept of nihilism, as developed here by Benjamin, is the guiding thread also of the hos me in Corinthians and Romans. The world decays, the morphe of this world has passed. Here, the relationship to the world is, as the young Benjamin understands it, world politics as nihilism. And that is something that Nietzsche understood, that behind all this there is a profound nihilism at work, that it is at work as world politics, toward the destruction of the Roman Empire. This is why you can’t make Lutheran deals with Romans 13, unless you give up the entire frame.” (Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, p. 72.)

St Paul and philosophy in Vancouver

The most exciting and most événementiel theological conference of the year – “Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy,” 4-6 June 2008 – now has its website up and running, and it’s open for registrations (early bird until 15 April). Here’s a note from the organiser, Doug Harink:

Join us for a conference which explores the critical appropriations of Saint Paul by recent and contemporary Continental philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and others. An international group of philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars and literary theorists will present papers on a wide range of themes arising from this recent philosophical appropriation of Saint Paul. Plenary speakers include Stephen Fowl, Paul Griffiths, Travis Kroeker and J. Louis Martyn. There will also be presentations by Creston Davis, Neil Elliott, Paul Gooch, Douglas Harink, Chris Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Jeffrey Robbins, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman and others. To register, or to get travel and accommodation information, visit the website or email Doug Harink.

So don’t be an animal, be a subject – be there for the event!

Nothing much

I’ve been laid up all day with a fever, so I took the opportunity to read Iain Pears’ novel, The Dream of Scipio (which is delightful), and to watch the remarkable film about the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls. The film includes Arenas’ famous observation about capitalism and communism: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream.”

Reading a bit of Agamben yesterday, I also came across a delightfully enigmatic quotation from Kafka’s notebooks: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.”

Conference announcement: Saint Paul's Journeys into Philosophy

The brilliant Canadian theologian Douglas Harink is organising what promises to be a superb conference on “Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy.” The conference will be held at the Vancouver School of Theology on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 4-6 June 2008. Speakers will include Stephen E. Fowl, Paul J. Griffiths, J. Louis Martyn, P. Travis Kroeker, Douglas Harink, Chris K. Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman, and others.

Proposals are invited for papers that address aspects of the appropriation of the work of the apostle Paul by recent philosophy, in particular by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and Slavoj Žižek, as well as their precursors, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Papers may address the subject from the perspectives of biblical studies, philosophy, political theory and theology.

Proposals must be no longer than 300 words, accompanied by the proposer’s name and institutional affiliation. All proposals are due by 15 January 2008, and should be emailed to Doug Harink. You can also contact Doug for details about registration and accommodation in Vancouver.

This definitely looks like it will be one of the best and most important theological conferences of 2008.

St Paul's journeys into philosophy

When Paul looked back on all his prior privileges and achievements, he could only exclaim: “I’ve lost all that now, like worthless shit, in order to gain Christ!” (Phil. 3:8).

Occasionally, one has moments like that in thought – when everything you had ever learned or known suddenly appears like mere “shit” (σκύβαλα) in the light of some new discovery, some unexpected gift or insight. That’s how I felt when, years ago, I first read Calvin; and I felt that way again when, a few years later, I picked up a dusty old book by someone named Karl Barth (it was his explosive early collection, The Word of God and the Word of Man). Suddenly and unexpectedly, everything I’d ever known was placed under judgment. As Bob Dylan puts it, “I got new eyes, everything looks far away.”

And I must admit, I felt a similar sense of shock and disruption and alienation – in a word, a profoundly disturbing awareness of theological σκύβαλα – when I recently read Alain Badiou’s astonishing little book on Saint Paul. My brain is completely submerged in Badiou’s works at the moment, and I’ll no doubt be posting more on him in future.

But for the time being, I was delighted to hear that Doug Harink – author of the brilliant study, Paul among the Postliberals – is organising a conference to explore the theological significance of the new readings of Paul by contemporary philosophers (e.g. Agamben, Badiou, Žižek) – and of Paul’s “readings” of them! The conference will be entitled “St Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements,” and it will be held in Vancouver, 4-6 June 2008.