Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction

Abstract

Religious discourse now permeates the theoretical humanities. At least since Jacques Derrida’s insistence upon complex connections between deconstruction and negative theology,1 there has been an onslaught of writing connecting the demise of traditional metaphysics to the apotheosis of modernity, and a general despair over the possibility of any purely “secular” form of critical reason. A new postmodernism in philosophy now seeks to move beyond merely immanent critique, toward the construction of alternative and experimental syntheses of knowledge and belief. Thus figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Caputo, De Vries, Eagleton, Taylor, Vattimo, and Zizek, among others, have put religious concepts at the center of both analysis and methodology in contemporary critical theory.2 Conversely, contemporary theology (especially the so-called radical orthodoxy movement) has found an engagement with theory to be crucial to its own ends in a post-metaphysical era.3 Meanwhile in politics, the perceived failure (exacerbated since 9/11) of secularization and liberal norms to bring genuine progress and peace has made a violent return to the shelter of dogmatic religious certainty an attractive option for those seeking refuge from an increasingly dehumanized globalization guided by a winner-takes-all neoliberalism that unites the world’s peoples only in enslavement to the economically entitled. But the compelling nature of religious conceptions of struggles against state and corporate power do not end or begin with fundamentalist believers. Even an atheist thinker like Alain Badiou has gone so far as to champion Saint Paul’s vehement Christian faith as a model for militant resistance to the present world order.4 Badiou claims that only something like Paul’s insistence that the community of believers are those separated out from every “positive” or constituted cultural identity has the power to model a humanity that can rise above the morass of confused desire upon which capital and state power play. Badiou summarizes the ideology of capitalism in the axiom that “there are only bodies and languages.” To this “democratic materialism,” which relativizes and thus belittles the significance of all events, Badiou insists we must add the exception, “there are also truths.”5 The militant church (or Maoist militant) belongs to no particular culture, “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28). Badiou’s insistence on a kind of religious interpellation after the