Tom Waits: Silent Night

Here’s some nice music for Advent: a rare recording of Tom Waits singing “Silent Night.” Click here to listen online.

Adrian Johnston: Žižek's ontology

Those of you who are into Žižek (yes, I’m looking at you, Shane) will be interested in Adrian Johnston’s very fine new book, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern UP, 2008). The book is a fascinating account of subjectivity and ontology, and it’s far and away the best and most interesting thing I’ve read on Žižek. (Actually, the best part of the book is Žižek’s humorous endorsement on the cover: he expresses some anxiety about the question whether Johnston “is the original and I am a copy.”)

To summarise Johnston’s argument very briefly: While Badiou wants to think subjectivity as something that can never emerge from being, Žižek tries to understand subjectivity as emerging from flaws that inhere in being. For Žižek, subjectivity occurs as a kind of monstrous mistake, a malfunctioning produced by the cracks and imbalances in being: “this malfunctioning occurs because substance is shot through with openings for possible deviations from its ‘normal’ functioning…. For Žižek, true subjectivity is a kind of catastrophic imbalance that shouldn’t exist, a monstrous ontological mutation that comes to be as an outgrowth of antagonisms and tensions immanent to the being of human nature” (p. 196).

This theory of subjectivity leads Žižek to rethink the very ontological foundations of materialism: “One of the most regularly recurring philosophemes in Žižek’s oeuvre … is the notion that being as such is ‘not all’. He repeatedly insists upon the incomplete and discordant nature of whatever constitutes the foundational substance of ontology. Žižek describes the Hegelian Absolute … not as a calm, serene, universal All peacefully at one with itself but, on the contrary, as at war with itself, as internally rent asunder by antagonisms and unrest…. A crack runs through being. Žižek identifies this crack as the subject” (p. 165).

On a related note, a reader of F&T has notified me of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (Blackwell, 2008) – I haven’t seen this yet, but apparently it critiques the enthusiasm with which some theologians have tried to appropriate Žižek and Badiou. If you’ve read the new Eagleton book, I’d be very interested to know what you think of it.

Moving to Sydney

A couple of months from now, I’ll be moving to Sydney to take up a position as Lecturer in Systematic Theology at United Theological College (a university-based seminary in Parramatta: it’s both a seminary of the Uniting Church and part of the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University). So I’ll be teaching undergraduate and Masters students, as well as supervising doctoral research. Needless to say, I’d be glad to talk to any of you Sydneysiders who might be considering doctoral work in theology.

I’m told that my great, great, great (etc) grandfather was Governor of the Parramatta jail, way back in the 19th century – and he was such a despicable tyrant that the inmates rioted and killed him. I trust my own time in Parramatta will be just as memorable.

Around the traps

• Some poignant autobiographical reflections on the pathology of theology: “I believe I’ve found something out about myself that I’ve always secretly feared: Theology isn’t fundamentally a noble exercise.”
  
• Unhappy booksellers at AAR (things would have been different if I had made it to AAR...)
  
• What makes for an adequate ecclesiology?
  
• Blumenberg and Schmitt
  
• Violence and Christian anarchism. This reminds me of a conversation about pacifism with some Barthian friends at the pub last night: I agreed with them that the world is irreducibly violent – but when I concluded my argument by appealing to “the church” as the inbreaking of peace, I was greeted with a roar of laughter! (I take this to be an indictment not of my ecclesiology but of the church’s apostasy...)
  
• Another new book from Australia’s most prolific scholar
  
• A series of posts on the people of God in the Book of Revelation
  
• A series responding to Nate Kerr’s book
  
• Call for papers: Foucault and St Paul
  
• A short film inspired by one of Tom Waits’ songs
  
• Benedict XVI on religion and culture
  

Iron & Wine and Augustine: on grace and mothers

One of Augustine’s favourite biblical texts was Paul’s question to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:7): “What do you have that you did not receive?” – Quid enim habebat quod non acceperat? Against Pelagian conceptions of grace, Augustine insists on the absolute priority of God’s action towards us in Christ. Even when God rewards us for good works, God is merely “crowning his own gifts.” There is, in other words, a sheer incommensurability between God’s gift to us and the gifts that we return to God. Even the best of our gifts are always derivative and dependent on the grace that we have already received.

I think there’s a nice illustration of this concept in the Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain” (from the 2002 album, The Creek Drank the Cradle – you can hear the song in this clip).

The song is an achingly beautiful depiction of the relationship between a son and his mother. The son is united to his mother through the gift of life and through the history they have shared. He recalls that fragile, fleeting moment after birth, “the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body.” But while acknowledging this connection, he also reminds his mother of the painful distance which adulthood opens up between them. He has outgrown the faith she once gave him: “Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given.” He asks her – impossibly – to “forget me, now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to.”

And yet he remains haunted by their bond, by the fact that his entire life – with all its griefs and freedoms – remains an unfathomable gift. In one of the song’s most poignant lines, he pleads: “Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you.” This line could serve as an exquisite parable of the whole relationship between child and mother: even when he gives her a gift, there is a tragic incommensurability between what he gives her and all that he has already received from her. Any gift to the mother is at best a mere trinket, at worst a kind of theft in which the very possibility of giving is painfully wrested from her.

To sell the mother’s car in order to buy her a pair of shoes – that is the kind of half-comical scenario which Augustine describes when he speaks of the incommensurability between grace and gratitude. “What do you have that you did not receive?” It makes you wonder about the way Augustine’s own relationship with his mother might have shaped his theology of grace: perhaps the best cure for Pelagianism is the experience of the mother’s unmerited, presuppositionless giving. So that the proper way to respond to a Pelagian is still the same as it always was: “You’re a very naughty boy – your mother would be so disappointed!”

Augustine – “the son of so many tears,” as he called himself – was deeply aware that he had always already received, that behind all his actions lay a gift that could never be earned or repaid. Indeed, when Augustine mourns the death of his mother, he can only confess: “I will speak not of her gifts, but of Yours in her.”

Anyway, here are the full lyrics of that beautiful Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain”:

Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying upwards over the mountain

Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison
Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given
Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons can be birds taken broken up to the mountain

Mother don’t worry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner
Mother don’t worry, she’s got a garden, we’re planting it together
Mother remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry?
Blood on the floor and fleas on their paws, and you cried till the morning

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying always over the mountain

William Stringfellow: theology at the circus

Some time ago, a reader here at F&T recommended the work of William Stringfellow – a writer I had never really come across till then. And when Kim Fabricius came to visit recently, he told me that he had also started reading Stringfellow. So this week I finally started reading him too, beginning with the excellent Eerdmans anthology. This is astonishing stuff – Stringfellow’s analysis of the principalities is especially good. I’m also intrigued by his love for the circus (he and his partner Anthony Towne once spent the summer traveling with a circus!). Here’s an excerpt of Stringfellow’s theological reflection on the circus:

“The circus is among the few coherent images of the eschatological realm to which people still have ready access and ... the circus thereby affords some elementary insights into the idea of society as a consummate event. This principality, this art, this veritable liturgy, this common enterprise of multifarious creatures called the circus enacts a hope, in an immediate and historic sense, and simultaneously embodies an ecumenical foresight of radical and wondrous splendour, encompassing, as it does both empirically and symbolically, the scope and diversity of creation. I suppose some ... may deem the association of the circus and the Kingdom scandalous or facetious or bizarre, and scoff quickly at the thought that the circus is relevant to the ethics of society.... To [these people] I only respond that the connection seems to me to be at once suggested when one recalls that biblical people, like circus folk, live typically as sojourners, interrupting time, with few possessions, and in tents, in this world. The church would likely be more faithful if the church were similarly nomadic.”

—William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), p. 53.