The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. By Thomas A. Carlson

Abstract

Chicago sits astride the busy intersection of “religion and postmodernism.” Such is the name of the series whence we now and then receive sometimes clarion, sometimes muddy, transmissions confirming Gianni Vattimo's report of the “breakdown of the philosophical prohibition against religion.” A recent transmission from series editor Thomas A. Carlson is superintended by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's characterization of human being as indiscretae opus imaginis, translated by Carlson to read “the work of an indiscrete image” (vi–vii) and threshold for the amplification of a topic first given book-length treatment in Carlson's Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999). Though Indiscretion is not prerequisite to reading and profiting from The Indiscrete Image, readers unversed in the particular idiom and bibliographies of so-called “political theology,” as practiced by Hent de Vries or Kenneth Reinhard (whose blurbs adorn the dust jacket of The Indiscrete Image), may be put off by this latest monograph. Carlson is freest when playing, however briefly, with Pico, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and James Joyce. In contrast to these bright bursts, his vigor surely dulled by the clotted prose of the onetime rector of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Carlson's running engagements with Martin Heidegger seem torpid. Frankly, sentences of the following length, freight, and syntax are not sufficiently rare: Now, while one indeed has to acknowledge the common tendency of social scientific thought to involve an overly secure (and thus often impoverished) conception both of the human and of religion—Heidegger does, after all, identify something all too real in his critique of “newspaper science”—I want to note also that the anthropology grounding this understanding of religion as world construction by means of human creativity can itself recall—if in ways unexpected both to the social scientists and to their critics—the anthropology of mystical tradition that I've been sketching out. (129)