Monthly Archive for June, 2010

The Importance of Punning

Published
by
A.D.
on 06/25/2010
in Theology and other
. 0 Comments

Psychoanalysis seems to say that we are fated to be enjoyed by our unconscious desire. That the desire “of the other” imprinted on us before we had the weapons of language sets in motion a kind of repetition compulsion that Freud thought bespoke of Thanatos, the death drive. This complex caused Lacan to doubt, at times, the possibility of “cure.” At his better moments, though, he comes forth with what I would call I kind of Christian view of language. It is a view that says, yes, we are determined by the language bestowed on us by our parents — even our first parents. Original sin, in this context, is the bad habits of perverted desires, forged into the manacles of language. We are born into a language, and it is a language that veers us away from loving God and neighbor, curving us inward to a love of self, and of things that prop up that self. Let us accept that our unconscious is determined in this manner by a language that existed before us, will outlast us, and is up to no good. God’s saving work can be viewed as a kind of divine pun, for as Lacan pointed out, while the signifiers are lodged in our unconscious, the signifieds are not necessarily fated in their linkages. The signifieds have a tendency to slide, due, in part, to the equivocity of language. May one not, like Samson, take the chains that one is given, and put them to a different purpose. “I am a slave doing jigs for the Philistines, but rest my hands on these pillars, and let out a call for the last dance. . . . . . ” I’m not sure how many puns we can attribute to Jesus, but one seems important, that of Peter as the rock. Anyone who has ever read the Gospels knows that Peter was anything but that. And yet, there could be no better man upon which to build this certain kind of community known as the church than one who’s name comes to signify, not what he was, but what God could make of him.

Originally published March 6, 2010.

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The Eschatological Remainder

Published
by
DWM
on 06/25/2010
in Theology and other
. 0 Comments

The contours of the kingdom that is already among us do not readily present themselves and they are not – following Augustine (and Metz) – identical with the institution of the church or, rather, the different ecclesial institutionalizations that call themselves churches or Christian denominations across the world… Yet, by faith, we believe that Christ is among us now as well as coming again, and the body of Christ also. By “a certain continuity,” I mean that we are already living within the future messianic return. Eschatological remainder alerts to a messianism operative now – a messianism that Agamben explores. Such continuity views eschatology not as what is lacking in all the secular ideologies of the future, but what is excessive and superabundant to them.

Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 170

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Bachelard on the Genesis of Language; Williams on theological poetics

Published
by
DWM
on 06/23/2010
in Theology and other
. 0 Comments

The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression, it is youthful language. The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul. We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xiv-xx

The transmutation is a reforming of the language, not the disappearance of the praised object into existing patterns of words foreordained responses. It is, as David Jones said of all art that is in any sense representation, a ‘showing forth under another form’; and for this to be serious, it entails some sens at some stage of loss of control, unclarity of focus. A celebratory work that simply uses a repertoire of stick techniques that direct our attention not to what is being celebrated but to the smooth and finished quality of its own surface is a failure. So with the language of praise for God: it needs to do its proper work, to articulate the sense of answering to a reality not already embedded in the conventions of speech; to show the novum of God’s action in respect of any pre-existing human idiom.

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, 9

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from Graham Ward’s Politics of Discipleship

Published
by
DWM
on 06/21/2010
in Culture and Theology and other
. 2 Comments

The true politico-economic nature of Globalism

What is evident is that globalization is not at the vanguard of of democratization. Indeed, it cannot be because no one controls the unbounded market and therefore no one is accountable to it, whereas democracy’s requirements for checks and balances demands means whereby a public governance can be made. Globalization is transforming democracy, undermining what makes democracy flourish – a vigorous civil society. As mentioned in the last chapter, one of the key characteristics of the postdemocratic condition is the increasing government of state policy by economic matters. Does, then, the correlation between aggressive democratic states and aggressive multinational corporations come about because of copycat managerial strategies or because, where power is increasingly understood in terms of economic and military strength, negotiations have to be made between international leaders of commerce and key national governments implicated in empire?

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