Subjectivity, Revolution, Invention

Abstract

The turn to religion in theory--and I think particularly here of the recent work by Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek on St. Paul--is potentially a great boon to literary studies. Theology matters in a way that it hasn't in a long time in philosophical debates in North America and Europe. Scholars are thinking topics of contemporary importance (subjectivity, authority, aesthetics, ethics, religion and the secular) through theological categories. Part of the reason for this rekindled interest is that theological categories provide unique lines of critique against key concepts within the liberal political and philosophical traditions. Here I will briefly summarize three such concepts. The Question of Subjectivity The new attention given to Paul focuses on his role as an innovator in the theory of a universal subjectivity--this is summed up for Badiou in Paul's announcement that now there is neither Greek nor Jew. Breaking out of all constraints of time and culture--Jesus, and especially Paul, are able to grasp and proclaim the accessibility to all of an unimpeded fidelity to a truth-event. It is not clear to me that Badiou avoids the larger problem of the liberal narrative of freedom of the self, which is the refusal to admit any real and definite limit to the self's boundaries. But his attention to Paul on the question of subjectivity opens the possibility of a theological critique of liberal individualism. Talal Asad has pointed out that this liberal doctrine of the absolute freedom of the self is always articulated within the political framework of the modern nation-state, which reserves ultimate power over the self because it can put the citizen to death if it is deemed necessary to state security. Theology begins to speak to this contradiction in its insistence that subjectivity originates in the submission of the self to benevolent authority--which is precisely authority that refuses to aggrandize itself but uses power charitably. This opens a salient critique, from the perspective of theology, of the fundamental structures of political power in the modern nation-state. The Question of Radical Change Historical materialism, following Benjamin, has returned to the notion of the messianic to revive the discourse of revolution in a post-communist context, but the underlying theory of transformation still relies on the psychoanalytic hope that the subject can figure itself out by extrapolating itself from confusion, error, deception (as in Santner's psychotheology). Again, moving the argument to the terrain of theology opens the possibility of a more radical response. On the level of subjectivity, the theological term that addresses this concern is conversion. Radical change, revolution, evental interpellation--these things happen when the subject encounters the Same Old Thing in a new way and everything, including personal perception of the world, is transformed. In conversion, the self comes into freedom not by removing every stricture to its limitless expansion--but by walking in the path that has been walked countless times before. Theology (in its relation to what Foucault was at the end of his life calling spirituality) breaks decisively from philosophy here because its understanding of radical change is grounded in a return to the traditional or the familiar. This is a change instigated by a response to an external interruption, not a self-motivated figuring out. Rene Girard understands the novel as traditional in this sense. The Question of Literary Production I work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American texts that often get critical short-shrift because they are seen to be too derivative. Perhaps sometimes they are. But, as literary critics--and despite the opening up of the literary canon--we have yet to fully emerge from the eighteenth-century cult of original genius, which is a foundational ideal to the secular modern nation-state. Invention was central to this development because (in the replacement of an entire religious tradition, which could no longer support the neutral state) a new tradition had to be constructed in order to supply the missing cultural sources for the nation. …