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.