Friday (if tardy) Florilegium

Because the last few days got away from me, I was able to post these on Friday. So, dear reader, below you will find not only some interesting links from last week, but also a few from the beginning of this one. Here follows a few internet garlands for your enjoyment ....

• The discussion of Philip Goodchild's book Theology of Money is now officially over. Since I've previously provided links, here are the remaining ones: See these links for parts six, seven, and eight, along with the conclusion, an author's response, and a few final thoughts by discussion organizer Anthony Paul Smith, who also provides a full listing of the links to all the previous parts.
• Over at ITM, Karl Steel offers two posts: one about working on "syllabus building" during the mid-winter break, and another briefly noting two books, Ann Rice's Angel Time and Carly Phillips' The Nature of the Blood.
• Nicola Masciandaro on The Whim offers a catena and text on "Anti-Cosmos: Black Mahapralaya."
• See The Immanent Frame for a very thoughtful and demographically rich post on the so-called rise of the self-identified 'no religionists," entitled, "Who Has 'Religion'?"
• And Kvond has yet another lovely post, this time on Brian Massumi's Parables of the Virtual.

That's it for now, but more to come later in the week. Also, putting the final touches on the second part of my post on Judith Butler. Look for that, my promised conference report, and some other items before the week's end.

"To Say Something In the Wondering" (Part One)

[Take note that Daniel Barber and Adam Kotsko continue, with the fourth and fifth posts, respectively, the discussion of Goodchild’s Theology of Money.]

"...I understand theoretical work not as establishing universal truths but as developing conceptual schemes that can be taken up and revised in various locations and times."

Judith Butler

My last post referenced the newly available podcast of Judith Butler’s talk on Judaism, Zionism, and the religious resources for the critique of state violence. I strongly encourage taking the time to listen her talk (along with the others by Habermas, Taylor, and West). I’ll have more to say about the content of her remarks in part two of this post, but to those for whom it might be useful, I’ve prepared a partial transcription of the text from the podcast. It was never my aim to transcribe her talk, either in full or part; rather, as I listened to it with the intention of taking a few notes, I found myself doing much more than that. I once again found myself compelled and arrested by Butler’s voice, by her words. This relates to my own—and what some have called perverse—love of Butler’s prose style. There’s magic happening for me in Butler’s syntax and word choice, grammar and lexicon. Maybe it’s her performance of a certain dialectical defamiliarization, most often present through a repeated employment of unresolved interrogative serialities. What Butler theorizes at the level of social ontology and subjectivity, she exemplifies at the level of prose style: instability, incompleteness, and a certain constitutive incoherence. The prose performs what it describes.

For such reasons—and I’m sure there are many other ones, only some of which I may be aware and able to articulate—I always return to and eagerly anticipate and devour any of her writings. A similar affective relation subtends my continual engagement with a range of other thinkers—Sedgwick, Caputo, Derrida, Agamben, de Certeau, Lingis, Benjamin, Hardt/Negri, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nancy, Hegel, and Jordan, to name only those to whom I most often return. For me, what such a list of thinkers share that is most compelling, most arresting, is not just the radicality of their provocative content, but their equally radical presentative forms—forms ranging from and operative at the levels of syntax and lexicon through choices to challenge disciplinary codes of argumentative intelligibility by employing aphorism, the anti-philosophically ethnographic essay, or more general disruptions to the mise-en-page. Just as Butler can speak in Undoing Gender of experiences of dispossession in the making of a livable life, so too can we speak of the need for forms of cognitive dispossessions. This, for me, has always been the most compelling and visceral importance of theory: it’s ability to undo us and to compel new forms of thinking and relating. Theory is, and has always been, for me eminently visceral.

But my appeal to listen to Butler’s podcast emerges out of another conviction, one that aims to counter certain accepted stereotypes of theorists as amounting to little more than caricatures of thought or reductionistic tag lines: what we might call the “greeting card theory of theory.” Implicit here is the belief that theorists can’t continue to develop their thinking. This was also the case with Derrida’s reception within literature programs, as if “figuring out” the Derrida of the 1970s was “figuring out” anything interesting he might ever have to say. A similar example might be the largely new historicist promulgation of the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume I.

I think this has been played out perniciously in Butler’s case, and perhaps with no greater vehemence than Martha Nussbaum’s painfully vicious 1999 New Republic ad hominem. Indeed, many will recall that Nussbaum’s text is but an example of its author’s own inflated sense of importance as a diagnostician of what is “properly” theoretical and therefore good (with all its moral weight) work; Nussbaum’s supposed “engagement” with Butler is so cartoonish that even those critics who have disagreed with or contested Butler’s positions often find themselves coming to her defense against Nussbaum. But while I may have conjured this ghost of the critical past (and there’s an obvious psychoanalytic discussion to be had as to why I feel so haunted by this ghost, why I can seem to let it stay dead and buried where it belongs), I certainly don’t want it to linger. Or, perhaps more fitting for these long December days, we might think of my conjuration of Nussbaum’s horrid text less as some reanimated spirit than a bit of undigested beef. Humbug!

In any event, the reception of theory is something about which I am very often concerned, and in this I am as interested in who has been received and when as the what of theirs that has been privileged. Certainly one can point to the all-important issue of translation, and it is always crucial to consider when and what possible motivations (including the culturally symptomatic) obtain within a field of translatability. Why translate this work at this time? So,there is a discussion to be had about the temporality of theory. But we can also consider the issue more restrictively. What aspects of a thinker’s output are considered readable within a certain disciplinary horizon? Posing this question certainly doesn’t (or at least need not) entail effacing a consideration of theory’s temporality: our desires for particular theoretical schemes are as much a response to certain felt needs as they are the conditions by which we are enabled to recognize what our needs might be.

It is in this way that I agree with Jonathan Culler, who writes about how we are “ineluctably in theory”: that our very ability to pose the questions we ask is itself already made possible by the “space articulated by theory” (see his The Literary in Theory, pp. 2-3). This is why theory can never be a simple reflection of some believed independent reality leading to some supposedly practical application. No, theory never shuttles in such a way, as if the distance between points A and B were so easily bridged. There is more like a New York subway line: initial tracks may have been previously laid, but new ones will always be needed, new tunnels and lines constructed, and in each and every instance, amidst a diverse throng of passengers boarding and departing in their many anonymous and exponentially infinite ways, there are starts, stops, detours, and the occasional pull of the emergency break.

This unexpected peroration aside, Butler’s podcast also speaks directly to the reception and appreciation of her most recent work, especially insofar as these writings deal with questions of ethics and religion. Here another point to raise but hold in abeyance is what precisely is meant when one speaks of the/a "re/turn to ethics" or, somewhat correlatively, the "re/turn religion." Derrida, of course, famously resisted this language of turns, and equally so, I think, I think in Butler. Not only does all this talk of "turning" leave us dizzy, it fails to account for its own performativity: to interpellate a “turn” toward ethics/religion is to call into being a horizon of audibility within which certain claims might be speakable. That is, whatever else a "turn" in theoretical circles might be, it is far from a constative naming but instead a tropological performance. To speak of a theoretical "turn" can also be a way of retroactively fitting previously unheard (sometimes willfully misread or ignored) texts or positions into a now consumable product (and I think such capitalist language of the marketable is appropriately descriptive). Here we do well to recall that the very rhetorical language of "tropping" we might use to describe this phenomenon itself stems from the Greek tropos for "turning," since in a trope one turns a thing’s literal meaning toward more figurative ends. So maybe getting dizzy is constitutive of the theoretical game: "pussycat, pussycat, we all fall down." So much for abeyance.

In part two, I will return (or, perhaps, finally attend to) Butler’s comments on religion and Judaism within the context of some of her other recent writings and the appeals therein to those proper names—Benjamin, Levinas, and Arendt, most notably—of a certain Jewish intellectual tradition.

Friday Florilegium: Money, Secularism, Religion, Anonymity

So, in my ever-renewed efforts to update this blog more frequently, here are few new interesting links I've come across.

• Day 3 of the ongoing discussion of Goodchild's Theology of Money

• The Immanent Frame, a collective blog offering a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges among leading humanities and social sciences scholars around the issues of secularism, religion, and the public sphere, previously posted the audio files from its October symposium at SUNY Stony Brook on "Rethinking Secularism." The event featured talks by notables Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Cornell West, with closing remarks by Craig Calhoun. See here for an open thread on the event. As a supplement to these aforementioned links, which were all posted in early November, now see here for the full text of the ensuing exchange between Butler and West as moderated by Eduardo Mendieta.

• Kvond offers an especially elegant rejoinder to the most recent in a series of attacks on anonymous blogging. I won't enter the fray of such "prejudicial hilarity" here, except to note that what I find so elegant about this rejoinder is Kvond's Spinozistico-Deleuzian meditation on the benefits and possibilities of "anto-nymy" as continuing the "long history of pseudonymous writings" within the "virtual world’s new potentiality for micro-climates of interpersonal subjectivity." Offered there is a truly graceful reminder about the powers and effectivities of blogging as an activity of pure immanence as contained/enacted in the "name." Kvond's rejoinder here to the equally always thought-provoking Larval Subjects continues earlier conversations, on which see here and here.

Also, I'll be posting more original content over the next few days, including (with permission) an interesting email exchange I've had with a friend and colleague regarding President Obama's speech this week and his "decision" to surge the troop levels in Afghanistan. Two other forthcoming posts will concern the observance of earlier this week of "World AIDS Day," and another on my now less than recent thoughts about the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal at the beginning of November, including the very positive reception of my paper on Jean Gerson, the discernment of spirits, and masturbation. But more on that shortly.

On Defeat, Disappointment, & Divergence: A "Prop 8" Florilegium

Despite a range of other political events in the past week -- including New Hampshire's move to legalize same-sex marriage -- I'm still thinking about the California Supreme Court's ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the November voter-passage of Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages. In a bittersweet move, the 18,000 couples married between May and November 2009, when same-sex marriage was legal in the state, are still considered valid.

The lone dissenter to the majority opinion, Justice Moreno, lambasted the majority -- and California voters -- for the passage of a an "unprecedented instance of...altering the meaning of the equal protection clause...to require deprivation of a fundamental right on the basis of a suspect classification." For the nearly 200-page document of the California Supreme Court, including its majority and two concurring opinions and Justice Moreno's biting dissent, see here (dated 5/26/09; docket # S168047) or here, if you'd rather not download the pdf. For some helpful, if at times partisan, legal analysis, see here, here, here, and here.

I offer the below florilegium as a way to register not only the affects of defeat and disappointment in the wake of the California ruling but also to suggest some divergence from the rights-based, divisive identity politics strategy of seeking legal recognition for same-sex marriage. I find myself in the queerly contradictory position of being both against banning same-sex marriage and against legalizing same-sex marriage, insofar as these alternatives -- banning, legalizing -- are framed within co-implicated systems of domination.


“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept….The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions….love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy….We need to rediscover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.”


“Queer politics is…a performative collective project of rebellion and creation. It is not really an affirmation of homosexual identities but a subversion of the logics of identity in general. There are no queer bodies, only queer flesh that resides in the communication and collaboration of social conduct.”


“Subversion is always partial and localized….If subversion does not subvert something specific at a specific moment, it does nothing at all. Thus one always needs to ask what the aim of subversion is, and what it is destabilizing….We should add that if ‘subversion’ is always partial, this is partly because a subject’s position within relations of domination is never simple. There are always multiple hierarchizations, sometimes contradictory among themselves….We need to try to conceive of the ensemble of systems of domination and oppression together as a totality, to think of these systems in their multiplicity and with all of their articulations.”


“Revolt is never only a matter of action. Revolt, the forces of opposition, grow out of resistance, reflection. The combination of these new powers becomes very important: it determines the content of struggles….The victory of the authorities…[does] not reaffirm the old system but, on the contrary, profoundly modifie[s] it, making possible new forms of resistance and struggles, new lines of flight. It [is] therefore necessary to adapt to this new situation, to respond to trends, to the reality of the new relations of power that this transformation implie[s].”


“[Why is there] always the demand to be oriented toward sustained, intimate relationships…?”


“The topic of gay marriage is not the same as that of gay kinship….The petition for marriage rights seeks to solicit state recognition for nonheterosexual unions, and so configures the state as withholding an entitlement that it really should distribute in a nondiscriminatory way, regardless of sexual orientation….The normalizing powers of the state are made especially clear, however, when we consider how continuing quandaries about kinship both condition and limit the marriage debates….[L]et us consider for the moment the ambivalent gift that legitimation can become. To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation. It follows that the delimitation of legitimation will take place only through an exclusion of a certain sort, though not a patently dialectical one. The sphere of legitimate intimate alliance is established through the producing and intensifying regions of illegitimacy….[But] we misunderstand the sexual field if we consider that the legitimate and the illegitimate appear to exhaust its immanent possibilities. There is outside the struggle between the legitimate and illegitimate… field that is less thinkable, one not figured in light of its ultimate convertability into legitimacy….”


“It is undeniable that the restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples is a potent form of discrimination, regulation, and stigma. But to combat that inequality requires us to think beyond the mere inclusion of gay couples and to recognize that marrying has consequences for the unmarried.”


“…within the history of gay culture, even in the case of an individual author, a tradition of conformism and a tradition of subversion can coexist to the point of being indissociable, even indistinguishable, from one another. The two are one. It is perhaps even the very inextricability of the two traditions that defines what we call gay culture.”


“…those who live outside the conjugal frame or maintain modes of social organization for sexuality that are neither monogamous nor quasi-marital are more and more considered unreal, and their loves and losses less than ‘true’ loves and ‘true’ losses. The derealization of this domain of human intimacy and sociality works by denying reality and truth to the relations in at issue….To intervene [in this object field] in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim….[W]hen the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place. The norms themselves can become rattled, display their instability, and become open to resignification.”


“A state that promotes marriages also disenfranchises people whose primary affinities do not get into the couple form and contributes to a culture that stereotypes these people as isolated failures, as immature and/or sexually indiscriminating, or as part of some mysteriously primitive social system.”


“The ability to imagine and cultivate forms of the good life that do not conform to the dominant pattern would seem to be at least as fundamental as any putative ‘right to marry.’ If so, then the role of the state should be to protect against the abuses of majoritarianism.”


“What would it be like if intimate couplehood did not have to function as an economic safety net for so many people?”


“Liberation unfolds a process that breaks with the oppressing way of life in order to actualize the shape of a fairer and more humane life. In short, liberation is a struggle for self-determination of one’s own existence by suffering….Liberation carries with it an immanent form of creation through labor such that to create and to produce is simultaneously to save. Work = liberation. Salvation is found in the act of laboring, which transcends the self-enclosure of alienation and estrangement.”


“Should a homosexual be a good citizen?”


“We need to begin to imagine an alternative legal strategy and framework: a conception of privacy that expresses the singularity of social subjectivities (not private property) and a conception of the public based on the common (not state control)….This is a molecular conception of the law.”


“A conception of activism as enlarging the life options of gay men and lesbians has a manifest appeal….But this way of thinking says nothing about whether pursuing legal marriage is a good political strategy, about the ethical question of what marrying does, about state regulation, or about the normativity of marriage….Presenting marriage as an unconstrained individual option—a ‘license’ in the same sense as a ‘sexual license’—requires us to forget that it is a social system of both permission and restriction….A marriage license is the opposite of sexual license. Sexual license is everything the state does not license, and therefore everything the state allows itself to punish and regulate. The gay and lesbian movement was built on a challenge to this regulatory system”


“Great political events are not the only things that are hard to live through. There are also all the simpler things, where one often has the impression of being in the right—it always takes time to realize how much others have suffered.”


“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”


“…memory determines continuity. And continuity is always the expression of power. It [is] necessary to sustain a subjective point of view, to combat the ‘blurring’ of history by which the authorities [seek] to mask our role and create an appearance of continuity. It is this blurring of reality that push[es] us off course, and that continues still today to hold us back.”


“So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace;
…………………………new hope to spring
Out of despair, joy but with fear yet linked…”


= = = = =

Sources [in order of citation]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, pp. 351-52
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, p. 200.
Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, pp. 126-27.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, pp. 41-42.
Michael Cobb, “Lonely, SAQ 106.3 (2007): p. 446.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, pp. 102-06.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, p. 108
Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, p. 126.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, pp. 26-28.
Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, p. 2.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, p. 112.
Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture,
Gabriele Fadini, “Ontological Resistance: A Meditation on Exodus and Power,” trans., Creston Davis, Angelaki 12.1 (April 2007), p. 66, emphasis original.
Leo Bersani, Homos, p. 113.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, pp. 203-4.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, pp. 95-97.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, p. 43.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 29.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, p. 41.
John Milton, Paradise Lost 11.117 and 11.138-39.