Over at AUFS they have just concluded a book event engaging Adam Kotsko’s recent work Politics of Redemption. Adam has just posted a response to the event and in it engaged one of the topics raised which is the highly debated but perhaps hardly debatable question of transcendence/immanence. I thought the response was quite diplomatic without interest in any sensational jabs (the jabs were quite under-stated but still present . . . well fine perhaps ‘jab’ isn’t even the right word). In any event I thought of commenting directly there but it would not have been in keeping with the event as a whole and since I am still waiting for a copy of the book I don’t have much to contribute.
I did, however, want to pick up on one line. Adam writes,
Even at its best, though, I can’t see how one can argue for divine transcendence — it’s always going to be an argument from authority, because it’s fundamentally an argument in favor of authority.
Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses have not always been engaging but they have offered what I think is a helpful corrective or supplement to much of my contemporary reading. I hope to post more on some earlier discourses but I am now about halfway through the eighteen and have come across his reflections on the soul, namely how to gain and preserve your soul in patience.
What, then, is the potency of life? A life, a singular life, a life that dies in the event, a fragile life that does not live in time and cannot be evaluated in terms of money – a life that necessarily dies in its incarnations. . . . Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have elevated bizarre idols to obscure this transcendental field. . . . the situation is hardly improved when one throws out the transcendent, allowing capital and time to become impersonal grounds of evaluation and thought. Life is controlled by that which does not live. All manner of tyrants and idols have been worshipped as supreme values, as dogmatic images of thought, or as transcendentals – philosophy is superstitious, all too superstitious.
All it requires is for thought to consider a transcendental persona, to show a little care for a dying rogue, to try resuscitation once more, to breathe a little life into ‘this dank carcass,’ ‘this flabby lump of mortality’, for thought to lend ‘a hand, a heart, and a soul’. For, in modern life, this dying rogue is no one but ourselves, and the transcendental persona of thought is our doctor. Life is immanence, ‘the most intimate within thought’, yet it is also transcendence, ‘an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.’ So often the concepts of immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other, as if one could be thought without the other. Nevertheless, the criteria for absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are the same: they consist in removing all pretenders from the role of the absolute. Transcendence only has a relation to this world in immanence; immanence only constitutes this world in transcendence. [emphasis mine]
Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God. I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity. God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself. And dies. The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death. Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order. It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.
Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ
I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse. This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings. However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel. Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead. This becomes the straightforward,
ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse
And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead. The dead is the absolute relationship. If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you). To love one dead is love a non-being.
In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful. But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object. If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love
What is going on here? Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology? Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology? I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice. Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp. Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological. They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion. It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.
And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead
I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space. I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space. It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim. Then light became absent. Things slowed down but my mind continued. Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled. This is the end, there is no further. But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?
This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces. It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence. I no longer see this as the case. I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary. In any event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately. Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS). Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.
A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does. It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought. The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’. Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]
This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion. I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence. Who is policing the boundaries? Who is claiming access or insight into the other side? Who has dug through the end? Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.
There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.
. . .
I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.
This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation. This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust. I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world. What else is kenosis? As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith. And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.
In his conclusion to Works of Love Kierkegaard introduces the words of beloved apostle, Beloved, let us love one another
These are words of consummated love that we novices are not yet able to speak. These words are somehow transfigured and blessed. They speak of the old law that is ever-new. We do not speak these words as we cannot leave the school of commandment prematurely but we must become hearers of these words. From here SK begins his final exposition.
Now only one thing more. Remember the Christian like-for-like, the like-for-like of the eternal.
Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God. I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity. God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself. And dies. The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death. Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order. It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.
