Review of Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity

Abstract

The growing influence of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Christian theology is nowhere more apparent than in this impressive work by Daniel Colucciello Barber. Here diaspora is explored not as a sociological phenomenon but as a concept, a composition of thought that reveals the differential nature of the origins of Christianity and its others, religion and secularism. What seems to be at stake in the concept of diaspora, for Barber, is its ability to destabilize the logic of domination that has been identified with much of the history of Christianity, and which arguably carries over into secularism as it is historically conceived. According to Barber’s view of the gospels, the Christian declaration—understood as the injunction to love one’s enemies and imitate divine perfection—provides a liberatory opening out of this logic of dominion and into the construction of new possibilities of human relatedness. How is it, then, that Christianity has historically been allied with domination and, as such, can be seen to have failed to enact its own declaration? Barber explicitly refuses the temptation to invoke this failure as either the basis for a rejection of Christianity or a rescue of Christianity through a return to the originary purity of its declaration. Rather, he invites us to think the conditions that allow us to contrast declaration with history. To do this, he suggests, is to think Christianity through the paradigm of a Deleuzian-Spinozist immanence, diasporically, that is, as a ‘serially produced fiction [or “fabulation”], one that can never be traced back to its origin, one that can only be produced again and again’ (34). Historically, Christianity has denied the political nature of its declaration in favor of an affirmation of being or of transcendence; the antagonism toward the world as it is lived is expressed not politically, but ontologically. To approach the Christian declaration through the paradigm of immanence, however, is to acknowledge that the gospel has no transcendent referent. Rather, Christian declaration is problematic in form; it problematizes that to which it is antagonistic (i.e., the world) without positioning itself as being opposed to the world. SOPHIA (2014) 53:413–415 DOI 10.1007/s11841-014-0443-z