Steven Shaviro begins The Universe of Things (2014) promising a “new look” at Alfred North Whitehead “in light of” speculative realism. The terms of this preface ought to be reversed though, since what follows Shaviro’s introduction is actually a “new look” at speculative realism “in light of” some Whiteheadean ideas. This distinction is important: readers should not seek out The Universe of Things for an introduction to Whitehead qua Whitehead or even a “new look” at Whitehead vis-à-vis current issues of cultural and critical analysis. (Indeed, better options along these lines include, respectively, Shaviro’s own earlier book, Without Criteria (2009), and the more recent University of Minnesota Press collection The Lure of Whitehead (2014).) Universe, on the other hand, is better described as an attempt to map the cumulative geography of speculative realism, a philosophical movement which Shaviro stresses should be referred to in the plural: speculative realisms. Speculative realisms (and its sibling endeavors like object oriented ontology and new materialism) are perpetually in search of heterodox traditions and forgotten figures—philosophical antecedents sought for foundational credence and inspiration. And in this sense Shaviro’s incorporation of Whitehead is the latest in a lengthening line: Graham Harman recuperates a certain version of Heidegger, Jane Bennett returns to Spinoza and Bergson (among others), and, more far afield still, Ian Hamilton Grant champions Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But if these and other thinkers raid the archive to consolidate new and distinct philosophical templates, Shaviro’s survey is decidedly more evaluative than constructive. Working Whitehead into the cracks of speculative realism, Shaviro widens that movement’s internal fractures in order to expose, and at most nuance—rather than overturn, reverse, or revamp—its prevailing assumptions.
Shaviro’s critical take on speculative realism relies on two recurring moves: first, an overarching unification and, second, a subsidiary distinction. First, in the name of unity, Shaviro stresses that speculative realisms hold in common a core desire to step outside what he—following French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux—calls the correlationist circle. As reiterated by Shaviro, the primary target implied by this phrase is Kant’s position that the world is only knowable and approachable through thought. “We” can never grasp an object “in itself” or “for itself” in isolation from its relation to us, the thinking subjects. This insistence means that any account of the world and reality is fundamentally an account of the world and reality as accessed through and by human thought. Speculative realisms are unified in wanting to get beyond this self-reflexive loop. Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Ian Hamilton Grant (the school’s four founding fathers)—as well as fellow travelers—shed the correlationist straight jacket by theorizing (or, better, speculating) about the real world, the world of the “great outdoors” (another Meillasoux coinage) or, as Eugene Thacker puts it in his “horror of philosophy” series, the world “without us.” (For a very different account which disputes whether “correlationism” refers to a fair or even a meaningful reading of Kant, see David Golumbia’s “’Correlationism’: The Dogma that Never Was,” recently published in bounday 2.) As Shaviro notes, there’s a timeliness to this “anti-correlationist” critique, since casting the philosophical net beyond the circumscribing human mind seems a deadly serious endeavor in the face of impending ecological catastrophe. Still, the warming planet is just the most obvious and palatable hook that initiates what Shaviro calls the “changed climate of thought” (4) recently amenable to speculative realism. And if both new materialism and object oriented ontology are more prone to non- or para-academic environmental and ecological interventions, then speculative realism is more interested in revisiting and recasting the history of philosophy.
A commitment to outfoxing correlationism unites speculative realism, but Shaviro’s second move—that of division—hinges on pinpointing the particular strategies employed to achieve this revisionary project. Repeatedly in Universe, Shaviro splits speculative realism into two main factions. On the one hand, Meillasoux and Brassier pursue lines of thought that Shaviro calls “eliminativist”: for these admittedly nihilistic thinkers, correlationism is undone by the revelation that thought is “epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without efficacy” (73)—that thought doesn’t rightly and necessarily belong anywhere in the universe. For Shaviro, Brassier goes further in approaching the “extinction of thought” than Meillasoux, who saves thought from complete elimination by introducing a deus ex machina according to which thought and life emerge “ex nihilo” and simultaneously from a universe previously devoid of both (76). The contrast to this first faction is found in Harman, Grant, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. Instead of proposing that thought is fundamentally inimical to the universe, this coalition of speculative realism wagers that agency and thought are everywhere. Positing the “sheer ubiquity of thought in the cosmos” (82), this position reaches its apotheosis for Shaviro in a panpsychic vision where all things—animate and otherwise—are sentient (if perhaps not exactly conscious). Shaviro places himself in this second faction only after making a further distinction that separates him from Harman in particular. Whereas Harman, according to Shaviro, stresses the withdrawn nature of objects—withdrawn in the sense that the object must always “recede” from its relations (30)—Shaviro joins Whitehead (and Latour) in making a distinction between epistemological withdrawnness and ontological relations (see 105). Where an object may always hold something in reserve from what is knowable to the perceiving mind (as Harman insists), even this measure of the object that is reserved may be affected and changed by modes of contact that elude knowledge and understanding. Because of “vicarious causation” and “immanent, noncognitive contact” (138, 148) (a mode of contact that Shaviro never satisfactorily distinguishes from more popular usages of the term “affect”), an “occult process of influence” occurs that is “outside” any correlation between “subject and object, or knower and known” (148). The object, then, is not so utterly withdrawn as Harman’s narrowly epistemological account suggests. So between eleminativism and panpsychicism as extremes of the speculative realism spectrum, Shaviro says, we’re faced with a “basic choice” (83).
Describing correlationism and the various offerings to get beyond it is standard fare for speculative realism. But what Universe lacks in originality it compensates for with breadth of analysis and consistently careful, patient exposition. Shaviro admirably treats a wide swath of speculative realists (plus quite a few philosophical giants from both continental and analytical traditions), and he does so with a tone perpetually modulated for utter clarity. Absent is any of the obfuscating rhetoric or over-the-top claims that one might expect from someone who sets out to correct Kant. In part Shaviro’s achievement stems from his own outsider status. His rich body of academic work—on everything from film studies to music video aesthetics to sci-fi infused accelerationism—as well as the light touch on display here and throughout his superb and eclectic online presence (see: http://www.shaviro.com/) stand him in good stead as a welcome interlocutor and guide. Approaching speculative realism as a kindred but not coincident thinker, he’s able to recapitulate his own coming-to-terms with ideas in a way that translates well to other sympathetic non-initiates.
Apart from style and tone, though, Shaviro’s approach is also commendable for a self-avowed pragmatism of ideas. In an aside in the first chapter, Shaviro applauds Isabelle Stengers for the insight that “the construction of metaphysical concepts always addresses certain particular, situated needs” (33). “The concepts that a philosopher produces,” Shaviro continues, “depend on the problems to which he or she is responding. Every thinker is motivated by the difficulties that cry out to him or to her, demanding a response” (33). While a fair representation of Shaviro’s own admirably simple and workmanlike prose, these statements also epitomize the generous spirit that urges Universe. Shaviro is careful to explain the fruits and situational benefits of every idea that he treats, perhaps especially those ideas that he wants to challenge—an attractive way of grounding philosophical ideas which, being speculative by definition, sometimes feel quite flighty.
The discussion of panpsychism that spans chapters four and five is the most exciting and original element of Universe. In part this is because it draws on a body of work in cognitive science and the philosophy of biology that Shaviro knows well and that is fresh fodder for discussions of speculative realism. His discussion in this section also has the added charm of giving itself over to the speculative freedoms afforded to speculative realism itself. As Shaviro recognizes, speculative realism is at its best when it joins with speculative fiction in the common task of “extrapolation” (10). Thus in considering panpsychism we’re teased with the notion that slime molds have thoughts (88). Less bogged down by the minutia of distinctions between this SR thinker and that, Shaviro joins a more diverse group of thinkers to consider, for instance, Thomas Nagel’s question about what it’s like to be a bat. Well aware of the absurdities attendant to a truly panpsychic vision, Shaviro lets speculation carry the day, and it’s a pleasure to follow him through a romp that ties the questions of speculative realism to a longer intellectual tradition of sometimes strange twists and turns.
Also helpful and fresh for speculative realism—although somewhat hard to square with the rest of this book—is Shaviro’s first chapter, which shows how Emmanuel Levinas helps us appreciate speculative realism even as Whitehead’s “aesthetic” mode of “contrast” departs from Levinas’ “ethical” encounter with the Other. Where for Levinas the encounter trumps self-concern, for Whitehead both self-concern (or “self-enjoyment”) and “concern” for the Other are poles best understand in balancing counterpoint (rather than conflict). Apart from being the most detailed analysis of Whitehead’s thought—and, indeed, his thought as it changed in his long arc of writing—this opening account is valuable for SR in arguing that a commitment to circumventing correlationism need not be an ethical project in the traditional sense. In other words, in Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead, a philosophy geared towards the object world “without us” isn’t premised on care. The problem here and elsewhere in Universe, though, is the fuzzy usage of the term “aesthetic.” As I’ve suggested, chapter one deploys this term opposite Levinasian ethics in a frustratingly negative mode of definition: aesthetics is said to be what is not ethics. While gaining some clarification in the volume’s titular chapter (see 52-54), the aesthetic remains unclear even when given new treatment in a discussion of Kant that occupies the last ten pages of the book. Here “aesthetic” is set against knowledge (or epistemology) rather than ethics, and, as my discussion of Shaviro’s disagreement with Harman suggests, “aesthetic” comes to mean something like noncognitive contact, or “affect.” If these disparate senses of the “aesthetic” are related or even mutually inclusive, Shaviro doesn’t do enough to show how.
For all its merits, Universe suffers heavily from being stuck between monograph and essay collection. One searches in vain for the absent promise that the book’s chapters can be read collectively or in isolation, approached in order or at random. Such a promise, at least, would admit that the chapters don’t serially build to anything in particular. Lacking this or any other clues from Shaviro, though, we’re faced with seven relatively short offerings that loop back on one another with frustratingly little meta-commentary. Much of the mapping of speculative realism as I’ve described it above via unification and division, for instance, appears essentially verbatim in chapters two, six, and seven. The treatment of Harman—both agreement and disagreement—in particular makes continual reappearance. The same could be said of the discussion of panpsychism, which is interesting the first and perhaps even second time but quickly turns suspect as it is recycled through chapters three, four, and five with only the trimmings changed. The mere fact that bits of argument can appear at the beginning and end of the book in essentially the same form (and with Shaviro seemingly unaware of such repetitions) leaves the reader wondering about the value of a journey that feels constrained to a treadmill. A more cynical reader might look to, and find answer in the book’s editorial meta-data, which reveals that the first three chapters are previously published. Insofar as Universe excels at any one thing, then, it may be at academic entrepreneurialism—a feat of (re)publishing in which a triplet of core essays are surrounded with the sort of rhetorical packing peanuts which actually detract from ideas that would be more forceful as standalone articles. The reader already deep inside the sweep of SR may find plenty in this extended cut edition, but those more casually interested will be better served to read independently (as interests dictate) “Self-Enjoyment and Concern” (on Whitehead, Levinas, and SR), “The Actual Volcano” (Shaviro’s primary disagreement with Harman), and “The Universe of Things” (a broad strokes and bouncy introduction to the promises and riddles of SR, new materialism, and object ontology). Each has gems of insight owed to Shaviro’s exhaustive research, and reading them apart from one another—perhaps even in their original contexts—would lessen the rather tiresome burden of trying to figure out how they all fit together.
Ben Murphy is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on 19th and 20th century American literature, the history and philosophy of science, and critical theory. His essay on James Dickey’s Deliverance and film adaptation is forthcoming from Mississippi Quarterly (2017), and you can also find his writing at ETHOS: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics and The Carolina Quarterly. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/ben-murphy
Poet, essayist, and multimedia artist Dawn Lundy Martin, editor of “On Race and Innovation,” a boundary2 dossier forthcoming in vol. 42, no. 5 (November 2015), was recently interviewed by the Library of Congress. Below is a small excerpt of the interview:
“In contrast to conventional images of the black female body, your poems are stark in their physicality; they also speak of the body in a conceptualized way. Can you talk about this duality?
The black female body is an invention of conventional thought. It has been conceived, at least in the West, via a series of manipulations, perceptions, and racist interventions by institutions—intellectual, political, and popular alike. I believe in the black female body only in so far as one is an individual who might make certain claims about their own legitimate being in the world. But that is difficult. How do we know ourselves except through the eyes of the other? How to claim something legitimately and intimately given the cultural representations of the black female body that have nothing to do with our interiorities? It’s a fraught intersection—femaleness and blackness—one that should not be easily articulated or regurgitated. Hence, what might be understood as a conceptualized means of approaching and speaking the black female body. I want to resist being put into your box of recognizability. I want to give the finger to those eyes of knowing/creating.”
In Spring 2013, boundary 2 published a special issue, Antinomies of the Postsecular, which assessed the so-called “turn to religion” in the humanities and social sciences. Under the movement term “postsecularism,” this academic turn to religion, commends itself as a necessary response to “the return of religion” as a social and political force in contemporary life. Whether such a “return” has actually occurred and what is at stake in making this assertion was the subject of b2’s special issue. The goal of the contributors to Antinomies of the Postsecular, as editor Aamir Mufti explained in his introduction, was to expose “the internal conceptual incoherence” of postsecularism as “an emergent orthodoxy” and to question the “political affiliations” of secularism’s critics, as revealed “by their treatment of modern religiosity” (3, 4).
One major source of incoherence is postsecularism’s account of secularization as a closed process with an expiration date for religion. By this misreading of Weber, to cite one of postsecularism’s bugbears, secularization is an abject failure. The global persistence of religion, which b2’s issue acknowledges as a neutral historical fact, is mistakenly interpreted as a resurgence or revival pressing up from cultures in resistance to secularism. The latter is conceived as an anti-popular and imperialistic instrument of domination, having its sources in European Enlightenment and the hubris of Western reason. Genealogical critiques of Enlightenment/secularism add to the irony of secularization’s alleged failure by detecting ghosted forms of “the sacred,” having Christian derivation, within reason’s self-understanding and within the liberal political imaginaries that rationalism underwrites. Reason is indebted to that which it disavows and tries to sequester; it was doomed to misprize the intimate entanglement of religion with culture and politics. Reacting to this misbegotten rule of reason, postsecularists resort to “culturalism”: shielding religion from external judgment by defending it as an expression of profoundly rooted local sensibilities (or, in more Foucauldian language, “practices” and “discourses”) buffering subjectivities against modernizing deracination and disciplinary schemes. Post-secularism’s attack on the ways that the Western liberal states have inscribed and bounded religion(s) thus frames these problems, which are certainly worthy of address, such that the secular is undermined as a source of analytical questioning while religion is insulated as a source of identity, filiation, and empowerment. Whatever the merits of this understanding of “the return to religion” – b2’s contributors found few – the conclusions that it reaches align post-secularism with some strange bedfellows: the anti-secular positions of religious fundamentalisms and conservative political theologies as well as those of religiously inflected liberation movements. Post-secularists may not seek some of these political affiliations and may even find them undesirable in many particulars, but their reading of modernity’s ailments finds enemies in common. Proponents of skepticism and intellectual consensus, for example, can find themselves on the defensive because they have the effrontery to throw acids on a people’s traditional beliefs.
Stathis Gourgouris, one of the scholars featured in Antinomies of the Postsecular, has elaborated his case against postsecularism in Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham, 2013), the first of a planned triptych that will include The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred. Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for the Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, Gourgouris comes to this project well-equipped by his previous works, the books Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford 1996), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham 2010); his translations of sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis (who is an intellectual touchstone for Gourgouris in this book); his two essays for Antinomies of the Post-Secular, one of which, “Why I Am Not a Post-Secularist,” is reproduced here; and his heated debate with Saba Mahmood in The Immanent Frame, which was one of the highlights of the on-line journal’s 2008 exchange, “Is Critique Secular?”
The “secular criticism” in Gourgouris’s title has its provenance in Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and his set of “lessons” (in the post-structuralist sense of the leçon, or ceaselessly thinking reflexively) can be seen as extending b2’s ongoing task of theorizing what Said meant by his conjoining of “secular” and “critique.” For Gourgouris, the two are inextricable, the first in its worldly orientation making possible the articulation of the second. Secular criticism is “an experimental, often interrogative practice, alert to contingencies and skeptical toward whatever escapes the worldly”; particularly, it is skeptical toward any notion of “authority that is assumed to emerge from elsewhere,” toward any knowledge “presented as sovereign, unmarked by whatever social-historical institution actually possesses it” (13, 64, xiv). These knowledges include discourses of secularism that would make any legal-political boundary between religion and the state rest on a metaphysical distinction between the secular and the religious wrongly conceived as essences. This is Gourgouris’s key dialectical movie: to preserve the secular as a practice and as “a space” that makes the practice possible, it must be defined over and beyond the limitations imposed on it by both academic post-secularism and secularism as an institutional power.
Lessons is organized into six chapters, the first half breaking down flawed conceptions of the secular and the second half building Gourgouris’ case that secular criticism is necessary if we are to imagine more democratic societies than we presently know. Chapter One, “The Poiein of Secular Criticism,” disputes anthropologist Talal Asad’s effort to draw a lineage for the notion of critique that traces it to Platonic and Christian traditions. Asad discovers in critique a displaced religious attitude: a quest after and veneration of the Truth, abstracted from an image of God but still bearing the imprint of monotheism, for the Truth of the critic is unalterable, inalienable, and singular (8). In other words, Said’s fearless intellectual inherits a practice of thinking made possible by religious/mystical modes of contemplation and rigorous ascesis of the subjective. For Gourgouris, the irony Asad relishes in this situation is willfully produced by his genealogy, which does not so much trace continuities as force analogies between worldly criticism and a “theological desire.” For the analogy to function, it requires a representation of “secular” criticism (Asad would effectively put Said’s adjective in scare quotes) as the effort to clear man’s thinking for the revelation of “a hypergood.”
Gourgouris instead sees critique as an activity like poiesis. Here Gourgouris is returning in capsule form to the theory of poetics that he develops at length in Does Literature Think? In that work, through meticulous close readings of Sophocles, Flaubert, Benjamin, Kafka, Celan, Genet, and DeLillo, Gourgouris models poesis as a unique kind of cognition that requires the making of things not thought before, and that in making these things also unmakes what is given: “to form is to make form happen, to change form (including one’s own)”(11). Poiesis is a making of the new and unmaking of the known materials of society (discourses, images, narratives) that potentiates far-reaching self-alteration: “things that may indeed appear to be impossible in the present time . . . cannot be said to be generically impossible, impossible for all time” (26). As Gourgouris proceeds, poiesis is valuable because its most sophisticated artistic products dramatize what critique also endeavors to enact: autonomy (auto-nomos), understood here not as reason’s free submission to “the hypergood,” but as the questioning, historicizing, and pluralizing of the authorities (epistemological, political) to which self-altering subjects give only provisional consent.
In trying to define secular criticism away from Said, Asad erroneously conceives it as a quest after a transcendental. The uncovered Truth, in this conceptualization, becomes a law given to the self from elsewhere, like a command from the almighty. In Gourgouris’s estimation, Asad makes the critic’s relation to reason heteronomous. Heteronomy, which receives greater elaboration in Chapter Four, is both a structure of decision and a state of alienation. In contrast to autonomy, heteronomy describes a structure in which “the law” (the reason for deciding) is given externally, from the other. For Gourgouris, all law is self-generated out of the social imaginaries of existing communities. Heteronomy therefore cannot exist except in a state where the law has been othered, occulted in a beyond that is made more real, more authoritative in being both beyond and more real, than the humble state in which men direct their own affairs. Whenever humans sever themselves from this worldly state of decision-making and institute an absolute other for sanctioning what they do, they have created a heteronomous structure. Under the self-alienated conditions of heteronomy, decisions take the form of a command/obedience structure, in which one listens rather than questions. Any transcendental is, intrinsically, something that commands, even though it is produced by the humans who obey it.
Having countered Asad’s attempt to impose a heteronomous structure on critique, Gourgouris’s second chapter proceeds to ferret out the transcendental in secularism. By the latter, Gourgouris refers to an institutional term representing “a range of prospects in the exercise of power,” particularly as pertains to state mechanisms (28-29). A priori and dogmatic substantiations of secularism Gourgouris deems “metaphysical,” and this adjective functions similarly to “transcendental” in the book’s proliferative terminology. However, there is a subtle reason for the differentiation that proves important. The “metaphysical” ends up being the name for any non-theistic statement of transcendental first principles; it designates whatever is taken to be an incontestable foundation, without confounding the notional foundation with the sacred of theology or religion (29). A metaphysic and a divine law are each, in application, heteronomous, but the former is “a set of principles that posit themselves independently of historical reality” rather than something held sacred that eternal God has posited (30). It is crucial for Gourgouris to provide these dual definitions, for his opponents, Talal Asad and anthropologist Saba Mahmood , discern secularism’s metaphysical layers only to theologize them for the purpose of revealing modernity’s disavowed religious substrata: “It is one thing to speak of the metaphysics of secularism and another to equate secularism with religion” (34).
An example of one of the “metaphysics” on which secularism rests would be the pre-social individual theorized by classical liberalism. It is the sanctity of this individual, god-like in his agency, his clarity, and his identity with himself, that secularism is often said to protect from religious intolerance. In contrast, Gourgouris sees this figure of bourgeois enlightenment caught up in the self-altering forces unleashed by a still ongoing process of secularization. The form of autonomy that secularization bares for view is thoroughly social in character (44). To be autonomous is not to give oneself the law, but, as citizens, to give the law to ourselves. It is as social members that we decide what the law is; to be autonomous is to not only to give ourselves the law, but also to recognize ourselves interrogating the law together. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who emerges as another opponent in Gourgouris’ Chapter Two (titled “De-Transcendentalizing the Secular”), has also famously argued against the reified idea of the individual in classical liberalism. However, he believes that our modern social imaginaries have built such protective carapaces around the self that we have difficulty experiencing an outside to its liberal representation. In well-known formulations, he has described the modern self as too “buffered” against any motivations that can be confused with enchantment. As a result, modern man – for all his sense of self-mastery – is actually dispossessed, haunted by a God-reference that has been voided of transcendence, though modern man still needs the transformational openness that God once provided. In other words, Taylor does not theologize the secular, as do Asad and Mahmood, but he does see it as impoverished. Gourgouris objects to “Taylor’s whole framework of valuation and determination,” and he pivots to Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) for the purpose of redefining alterity without resort to a “heteronomous” position outside history (43). Taylor is wrong to say that moderns need transcendence in order to experience a liberating otherness. Recalling his theory of poiesis, Gourgoruis argues that the otherness is something created by the self in its working upon the materials it finds within the world. This otherness is “immanent,” emerging from within autonomy, and involves no inrushing from a space beyond history: “The immanence of autonomy does not mean closure in a purely self-referential or self-sufficient signification . . . . Autonomy is nonsensical as a permanent state, as the property of a thing, which is why it has nothing to do with the imaginary of self-possession or the legacy of possessive individualism that is the crux of liberal law” (44). That Taylor cannot see the possibility of human satisfaction in autonomous self-alteration, whether achieved via politics, art, or eros, is a measure of his melancholic appraisal of the worldly: “Taylor cannot fathom that fullness, total plenitude and fulfillment, can be found in the finite and the fragile, in the ephemeral and the mortal, in the uncertain and the passing” (41). It is Gourgouris’ task, in his third chapter, “Why I Am Not a Post-Secularist,” to defend the sufficiency of the finite and the mortal to answer human striving and imagining.
“I am not a post-secularist,” he states with bald conviction, “because I am an atheist.” This first line begins the most eloquent of all the book’s chapters. Within its concentrated length, Gourgouris not only provides a vigorous case for atheism against its cultured despisers, but also builds his case that only a secular space, oriented toward a future in which the distinction theism/atheism will no longer matter, can produce the conditions for radical democratic politics to thrive. Since the second point is one that Gourgouris will amplify in subsequent chapters, I will also defer addressing it here and focus for the time being on his case for atheism. In marked contrast to the New Atheists, Gourgouris does not bother with demolishing proofs of God or citing evidence pointing up the absurdity of biblical accounts of creation or belief in miracles. To quote Wallace Stevens, Gourgouris plainly looks out from a horizon in which the gods are “dispelled in mid-air and dissolve[d] like clouds,” and makes “no cry for their return.” God’s death is a Christian idea. Outside the Christian imaginary, where Gourgouris places himself, the de-sacralization of society inflicts no melancholia – no divine haunting, absence, or silence, none of the governing motifs of writings that have seen in modernity a state of ruination. At the same time, there is nothing heroic in Gourgouris’s atheism either, for the question of God’s existence is no great either-or in his thought. The question is “irrelevant” to the secular consciousness he wishes others to imagine with him: “It would mean to live not as if God does not exist but to live as if God does not matter” (69). Rather than a ruined world doddering from shorn foundations, Gourgouris finds in a terrene of finite things, and ineluctable death, much cause for “wonder.” The word, connecting philosophy and myth in Greek, links aesthetic pleasure and speculation in Gourgouris’s usage; the experience of wonder felt in the human encounter with what is new and extraordinary discredits miracles, for it leads to questioning. Furthermore, it replaces the need for such beliefs with the pleasure taken in curiosity and in creative acts of pattern-making that give a feeling of intelligibility to reality. Reaching back to the Greeks as a touchstone, Gourgouris treats hubris as a passion imperceptibly sliding behind wonder that he condones in advance of its appearance as a specifiable motive. Hubris is conventionally the other to Truth, but Gourgouris prefers its risks to heteronomy (76). Still, there is a tragic element in Gourgouris’ account of a desacralized world. It stems not, as in pessimistic readings of Greek tragedy, from the defiance of a transcendental order. It is the “irredeemably sad” recognition that autonomy is possible only under conditions of impermanence. History is radically open-ended and shaped solely by human self-determination, and that very limitlessness is not circumscribed by death, but extended by it, for death denaturalizes all humanly constructed boundaries (106). The lucidity for which Gourgouris calls in these passages recalls Camus’s tragic humanism, except that Gourgouris’ never passes through despair.
Atheism, then, is tragic autonomy, attuned to the wonder as well as the mutability of finite existence and undaunted by the Christian proposition of the death of God. While I agree with Gourgouris that Christianity makes God’s death central to salvation history, I do not believe that he accurately represents this event’s theological significance within orthodox belief. Moreover, I believe that he unnecessarily dualizes the Christian and Greek imaginaries.
To take up the first objection, Gourgouris mistakenly summarizes dogma as such: “God dies so that he may be resurrected, simple as that. The instrumental outcome is all that matters (the abolition of sin happens with the Resurrection, not Crucifixion), and the reality of God’s death – God’s suicide, to be exact, vanishes behind the interminable ritual repetition of a mythical spectacle” (73). This misconstrues how atonement is supposed to be effectuated. Paul, Anselm, Athanasius are touchstones here, but no systematic Christian theologian dissociates the Atonement from the Crucifixion or argues that redemption only becomes possible with the Resurrection. The Crucifixion always entails the Resurrection, and the Resurrection always implies the Crucifixion, and they always work together to accomplish salvation. Certainly in the doctrine of Atonement there are relative degrees of emphasis between the Western and Eastern Churches, and between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. In Eastern Orthodoxy, there are many more icons of the Resurrection, as there is a greater stress on deification, or theosis, in the teachings of the Byzantine and Russian churches. It is interesting, further, to compare the iconographical emphasis of the Orthodox (focus on the risen and transfigured Christ, as in the Pantocrator icon) versus Catholics (focus on the suffering and broken Christ) versus Protestants (typically, an empty cross, which combines the meanings of both the former). Nonetheless, in each tradition, soteriology depends on the joint significance of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection: they work in tandem, never in isolation or separated by time. I have continued on this matter at some length not because it undermines Gourgouris’s case for atheism – it does not – but because he handles Christian thought somewhat ham-fistedly. Occasionally, his animus is wittily abrasive, as in his hilariously irreverent description of Christ as a reanimated zombie; but he can ride roughshod over subtleties and sometimes make neglectful over-generalizations.
This leads me to the second objection. Gourgouris opposes the Christian imaginary to the Greek in a manner that needlessly dualizes them and downplays the practice of religion among the ancient Greeks. Part of the problem here stems from Gourgouris’s tendency to celebrate what was thinkable in the Greek imaginary versus what is typical of the Christian imaginary. The “thinkable” here is an idea that I am interpolating from Castoriadis, whose own reflections on the ancient Greeks are clearly an influence on Gourgouris. Put baldly, the thinkable refers to what is possible to formulate and speak out of a social imaginary at given point and time in its history. The thinkable need not be typical and, indeed, may be inassimilable to conventional, inherited thought. The Christian imaginary Gourgouris sees in broad strokes: the mystification of authority, the darkening of antiquity, the denial of death, heteronomous dogma. In the Greek imaginary, contrastingly, Gourgouris finds the capacity, not everywhere actualized but available, for wonder, lucidity, democracy, and autonomy. This sampling of the ancient Greeks accentuates their modernity, but it occludes quite a bit that would destabilize Gourgouris’ binary of enlightened Greek versus regressive Christian. As E. R. Dodds reminded us some time ago in his classic, The Greeks and the Irrational, religion was robust even in the age of democracy and the great tragedians. Beliefs persisted in daemons, magic, soothsaying, oracles, and mystery cults. Animals were still sacrificed to the gods regularly as part of the civic calendar in Athens, and citizens made use of sacred images in public places of worship. Festivals, prayers, and processions still took place. Despite secularization among the philosophes, new religions like Orphism and Pythagoreanism developed in the 4th century, and Socrates was executed, among other reasons, for impiety. Or does Gourgouris limit his version of the Greek imaginary to the elements of modernity in the Classical Age and the Ionian Enlightenment?
The answer comes indirectly through Chapter Four, which connects poiesis and autonomy, themes of chapters 1-3, to ontology and politics, which will cascade into the book’s fifth and sixth chapters. The modernity of the Greek imaginary lies not in its rationalism, but in the polis and in the arts, where autonomy was a self-consciousness project. The project did not require the disenchantment of myth, as superstition or error, so much as its appropriation for poetic self-creation, as Gourgouris makes clear in Does Literature Think? With threads to this earlier book, Chapters Four and Five of Lessons in Secular Criticism, “Confronting Heteronomy” and “The Void Occupied Unconcealed,” go to a fascinating place conceptually, a rethinking of idolatry that extends its domain to transcendence, even if Gourgouris gets the reader there by way of a disputable theory about the operation of myth on the Athenian stage. The claims that he makes for an expanded sense of idolatry, as distinguished from myth, prepare for the criticism that he mounts of socialist philosopher Claude Lefort’s famous essay on democracy, “The Persistence of the Theologico-Political?” (1980).
In Gourgouris’s reading of classical Greek theater, myths were not only the narrative sources for tragedy, but also the stuff for mythographic reflection performed by the dramas. Myth, as he describes it in Does Literature Think? (2003), was a material means for Greek dramatists and their public audiences to reflect on the groundlessness of human creation (the making and unmaking of forms in history) where there is no divine anthropogony to teleologize nomos. In “Confronting Heteronomy,” he imports Castoriadis’s ontology to describe what both take to be the Greeks’ insight into the chaos of Being against which humans generate their societies and authorize them. Being was, is, and always will be disunited (105). Its differentiation “permeates all existence and thus precipitates the conditions for human beings to realize that (1) there is a necessity for nomos, for otherwise life is defeated by its own meaninglessness; and (2) this necessity does not confine humans to a de facto subjugation to nomos because it opens the way for them to create meaning and the frameworks of meaning” (106). Societies, however always occlude the generative chaos against which humans give form to their lives. The sacred’s chief function, in fact, is to mask the chaos of Being. The sacred is fundamentally distinguished from mythic imagining as Gourgouris defines it in Does Literature Think? Whereas myth is metapoetic, the sacred is the ossification of myth and its fusion with religious authority. Whereas myth tarries fearlessly with non-being as it produces figures of self-othering, the sacred throws up idols. Gourgouris does not except iconoclastic monotheisms from the accusation of idolatry; the more transcendental the image of the divine, the more cunning an idol it is. A complete image ban still produces an idol because its transforms non-representability into a sign of a latent absolute. To conceptualize idolatry this way is to sap the power of both blasphemy and iconoclasm as these have been practiced in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Monotheistic religions authenticate themselves by producing counter-sacreds whose images they can then desacralize. Applying Gourgouris’ logic, they are deflecting from their own cores of idolatry: in the religion of the heretic, they show the chaos of Being in order to make necessary the transcendental structure that conceals it again.
Nationalism and statism are also forms of idolatry that certify themselves with religious motifs and images. In turning to Lefort’s widely cited 1980 essay, Gourgouris intends to rescue its insights into the groundlessness of democracy while criticizing its pessimistic account of secularization. Gourgouris’s goal is to stave off post-secularist agendas that have seized on “The Persistence of the Theologico-Political?” – just as they have Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology – to delineate a theological desire within democracy that yearns for the symbolic structure of Christianity. Lefort observes a rupture between democratic political imaginaries and those of pre-modern Europe. In the latter, the state was symbolized by the king, a God-man having two bodies, one earthly/mortal and the other supernatural/immortal. In this corporatist representation, the state was embodied as the sovereign One: an infallible, omnipotent unity transcending the political subjects who die for it. The theological analog of this symbolism, of course, was the Incarnation. Democracies cannot sustain the corporatist representation of the state since the dēmos – the multitude – is sovereign and the autonomous practice of democratic politics decenters power, institutionalizes conflict. In the revolutionary moment, the markers of unity and certainty in the old imaginary dissolve, leaving democracy poised generatively upon the void between the real and the timeless One, which is now seen for the phantasm that it always was. Gourgouris affirms Lefort’s central insight that democracy “is the historical regime whose radical characteristic is to stage its internal conflicts openly for itself” in a space of power that is denuded of “the symbolic constitution of authority because, quite literally, there is no body in power” (Lessons 132). However, he objects when Lefort tries to explain why post-revolutionary societies revert to some form of the pre-modern political imaginary, in which power is once again authenticated by its mediating relation, in the body of the One, to a ground externalized as something sacred or metaphysical. According to Lefort, the tendency within democracies to become fissiparous and the horror of the void itself bring about a crisis that partially re-sacralizes politics: “Lefort seems to entertain the idea of a sort of recurrent desecularization, a sort of reincarnation of the religious in the midst of the void” (137, 138). In the West, the form these representational metempsychoses take is derivative from the Christian Incarnation, since this is the exemplary model from the past. Gourgouris intervenes here to say that what Lefort describes is not the recovery of any specifically Christian content. It is simply a reversion to idolatry, the old desire to conceal the “condition of radical uncertainty” that is our human lot (140). In place of the idol of the One, he proposes a continual disruption of symbolic representation in favor of “the uninterrupted visibility of the dēmos,” revealed again and again in all of its “multiplicity” and “internal antagonism” (143).
Refugees in front of the ruins of the temple of Theseus (1922)
Gourgouris thus calls for a poetic intervention in the symbolic field that will alter inherited political imaginaries so that the dēmos can see and reflect on its self-constitutive role, its struggle internally to find a political ground for renewed consent to the law that it gives itself in an undetermined historical process. To construct and sustain the form of “governmentality” that Gourgouris here imagines would require not only novel institutions but also the reconfiguration of mass media technologies and an end to entrenched patterns of consumer addiction. He follows the articulation of this mammoth task with a sixth chapter, “Responding to the Deregulation of the Political,” that moves from the analysis of post-secularism to a meditation on the promise of the recent global assembly movements, such as Occupy, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, and the Indignant Citizens Movement in Spain and Greece. These groups, we are to understand, enact the politics of secular criticism through their withdrawal of consent to neo-liberal capital and their demand instead for direct democracy.
Gourgouris’s hopeful speculations on the world movement for democracy return the text to his advocacy for “a politics of wonder,” a new politics combining skepticism and utopia for which atheism (as he defines it in Chapter 3) is best-fitted (Lessons 83). Crucially, Gourgouris’s atheism imagines its own obsolescence at a point beyond which the question of belief and quarrels over the secular versus the religious will have become irrelevant to the ways that people live with each other. In the meantime, however, it aims, in the mode of secular critique, to overthrow both the sacred of religion and dogmatic appeals to Reason in order to attack heteronomy in every guise. Only autonomy (as critique, poiesis, law-making, and self-instituting imaginary) can produce democracy as yet untried. Though Gourgouris, to his great credit, takes blinkered secularism as well as religion as threats to autonomy, I would like to turn, before closing, to his case that religion’s deference to divine power withers emancipatory politics.
To review, Gourgouris argues that religion restricts decision-making to a command-obedience structure in which the believer defers to a heteronomous authority. This power might be embodied in a hieratic office or a disembodied, transcendent and unrepresentable. Although Gourgouris tends to speak of religion categorically, he seems to object particularly to Abrahamic monotheisms, in which the language of sovereign God and redeemed subject, whether taken metaphorically or literally, implies a horizon of non-questioning and fealty to belief. (One wonders how successfully Gourgouris could apply the command-obedience model to polytheistic religions, like Shinto or Hindu, non-theistic religions like Buddhism, or pantheistic ones like Taoism.) Gourgouris does not exempt liberation theologies from his criticism of the command-obedience structure even though they may be aligned with populist or anti-imperialist movements. In a tributary of his quarrel with Saba Mahmood in Chapter Two, for example, he states: “I would never doubt, for instance, the revolutionary inspiration that liberation theology once gave to certain oppressed societies . . . . But as I have said several times, this does not mean that, come postinsurgency time, the time of self-determination, a politics based on religious command can institute modes of social autonomy – at least in known history this has never happened”(49-50). In the last instance, the religious “command” prevents people from seeing that they alone give authorization to their self-determination. Gourgouris follows this characterization with an arresting statement: “This is not to say, I repeat, that emancipatory politics cannot emerge from within a religious language. But it is to say that if it does, it must place this very language in question; it must deauthorize this language as command” (50). This remark, suggesting how religious language might revise itself to become viable for Gourgouris’s politics, comes as a surprise given the force of his secular convictions, but it is worth following up.
Let’s take for example James Cone’s God of the Oppressed, a classic of liberation theology. I do not intend it to be representative of its tradition, but illustrative of the incoherence that emerges when old language is unimaginatively combined with a revolutionary-reform message. Jostling with each other, we see the following formulations: “Divine freedom . . . . expresses God’s will to be in relation to creatures in the social context of their striving for the fulfillment of humanity” (175); “[H]uman beings are free only when that freedom is grounded in divine revelation” (182); “God is the sovereign ruler and nothing can thwart God’s will to liberate the oppressed”(196). On the one hand, Cone describes God entering history to strive alongside the poor and the disenfranchised in their struggle with entrenched, monopolized power and its ideology; God joins in all aspects of this conflict, which entails a prophetic critique of Christendom’s complicity in racism and social inequality. On the other hand, God is pictured as an omnipotent sovereign who controls providential history and on whom human freedom depends for its realization. Gourgouris might quarrel with both sides of Cone’s formulation, but he would most certainly object to the second, and rightly so given his premises. The self-interrogative act of self-determination is seemingly annulled by language that places sovereignty with God, here an absolute power that transcends the merely earthly powers of the oppressor. One could say apologetically that Cone is simply using inherited biblical language as inspired rhetoric to buttress an unswerving ethical commitment, but this rhetorical reading not only naturalizes what is supernatural in Cone’s text, it also preserves the objectionable notion that commitment (in this case, to justice) requires certainty of such sustained subjective intensity that, if necessary, it should be produced by belief in an unassailable authority. It is precisely the power to generate “subjective normative intensities,” or the Jamesian “will-to-believe,” that fashionably anti-liberal critics like Stanley Fish prize in religions and find lacking in “weak” or “indifferent” secularism. However, the religious command, in producing the strong, insistent form of belief that seems so attractive to those who see uncertainty as an impediment to commitment, can also become a mechanism for silencing internal dissent and steeling belief in the urgency of the belief. Such a mindset one can hardly imagine coping with the social heterogeneity that any democratic politics worthy of the name must include in its reflection.
I am not convinced, as Gourgouris seems to be, that monotheisms always produce the heteronomous subject that I have just described, but history indicates that the second is highly correlated with the first, especially when the religion – be it Christian, Jewish, or Muslim in identity – draws its impetus from the refusal of modernization. Taking seriously the impediments to autonomy that Gourgouris finds in the mindset fostered by (monotheistic) religious language, it is worth, for the sake of secular criticism, opening a conversation with theologies that have intentionally weakened the modeling of the divine and human relationship on sovereign-to-subject. There is the rich yet unfairly maligned tradition of theological modernism, which augmented certain trends in religious liberalism toward immanence. Contemporary with the end of the modernist movement, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in Germany, spent the months in prison prior to his execution writing about “a world come of age,” a world in which man had won “autonomy,” a world that did not need false religious obligations or inhibitions, that did not need a God conceived as the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The kind of command-obedience structure that Gourgouris calls heteronomous Bonhoeffer, in his prison letters, denounces as “phariseeism” and “religious methodism” (Letters 362). Cognizant also of the authoritarian impulses in his own religious tradition, Bonhoeffer feared the cultural temptation in the West to make a leap back toward “the heteronomy” of the Middle Ages (Letters 360). Rather than submit to this temptation himself, Bonhoeffer stresses in the letters not God as “sovereign” but God as “sufferer,” for only this God could enter a world that no longer had need of an omnipotent being that explains everything and wills everything (361). More recently, the varieties of “process theology,” “weak theology,” “secular theology,” and “a/theology” represented in the figures of David Ray Griffin, James Cobb, James Caputo, and Mark C. Taylor have worked in distinct ways to enlarge space for human agency and response while smashing as idols religious and metaphysical certitudes. Influenced by the ontology of Alfred North Whitehead, Griffin and Cobb deny divine perfection and truth, and emphasize God’s temporality as well as man’s. Bridging the post-liberal theologies of Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich (who famously urged his contemporaries to be unafraid to let “the God of theism” disappear “into the anxiety of doubt”) and Derridean post-structuralism’s sensitivity to contingency and context, Caputo defines God not as a person but as an ever breaking “event” that awakens human desire for something namelessly undeconstructible and always yet to come; this event relativizes all the logics and structures of the world, including those of religion. Taylor describes a nearly featureless God that animates networks of creative processes in nature and culture, structuring and de-structuring them according to “no mind or Logos,” but coming restlessly to consciousness in humans; this idea of the divine cannot be the object of faith, the metaphysical foundation of decision, or the limit to human interpretation (After God 346). Like Caputo, Taylor wants to transform the language of religion and not only attach old language to democratic causes. I should mention that some of these thinkers begin from premises (man as homo religiosus, the death of god as ongoing event, the spiritual underpinnings of secularism) against which Gourgouris has compellingly raised his voice, but they have shown greater capacity for dialogue, self-criticism, and nimbleness of thought than culturalist proponents of the post-secular.
Modish attention to demographic trends pointing up the statistical vitality of religion should not guarantee respect for belief or earn providential auguries of religion’s imperishability. One hundred years from now our world may be substantially more secular than it is now and atheism a preferential option for most of the population. Yet, in our contemporary conjuncture, it would be unnecessary and perhaps even detrimental to exclude from one’s theorization of a new democratic politics the religious liberals, humanists, progressives, and liberationists who could be its allies in the struggle against “the scorched earth policies of global financial capitalism” (xviii). Though with deep reservations, Gourgouris hints that it might be possible for people with a variety of religious as well as secular philosophical views to work toward common political goals and values so long as they avoid heteronomous formulations of belief. His book would have benefitted from taking into account already existing resources in theology for weakening the sovereign-to-subject language of traditional god talk. Notwithstanding this omission and some distortions in his dualizing of Greeks and Christians, he makes an essential intervention in the post-secularism debates by pointing out, through a range of deft responses to key texts, the laziness of intellectuals’ defenses of religious self-righteousness and declarations of secularization’s failure. More incisively still, he exposes the fallacy of conflating secular criticism with institutionalized secularism, and of tethering the latter to theology. Anyone seeking to comprehend the high stakes in the so-called “turn to religion” will find Lessons in Secular Criticism a most bracing read.
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Jason Stevens has taught at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center (Durham, NC). His work focuses on mid-late 20th century American literature and U. S. cultural and intellectual history, with emphases on the intersections of fiction, popular culture, religion, and ethnicity. His first book was God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Harvard University Press 2010). His writings have also appeared in boundary 2, American Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Immanent Frame. In 2014-2015, he is a fellow at the Center for the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh, where he has been completing a book project on American film noir and making preparations for the international conference, “Protestantism on Screen” (Wittenberg, June 2015), of which he is co-sponsor.
boundary 2 is proud and honored to announce that Christian Thorne has joined the Advisory Board.
Christian Thorne teaches critical theory at Williams College and is the author of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. His writings on monsters, superheroes, and political ontologists can be found here.
Petra Dierkes-Thrun commits The b2 Review to a focus on Gender & Sexuality:
It is with great pleasure that I have agreed to join the collective as an advisory editor to launch a new online initiative for Gender and Sexuality Studies for The b2 Review. While boundary 2 has a longstanding interest in the best scholarly work of any kind, it is both fitting and necessary that gender and sexuality become a more obvious area of interest for the journal’s intellectual inquiry. The new Gender and Sexuality section aims to provide a flexible and mobile platform for the discussion of important new work both in feminist and LGBTQ studies. We will publish brief essays on current trends or events, interviews, and reviews of interesting books and other projects (including digital ones), keeping in mind boundary 2’s commitment to identifying and pinpointing important contemporary intellectual, conceptual and performative topics and trends that affect society at large.
Our first project, a collage in memory and tribute to the late queer, critical race, and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, was already published in March. This month, we offer Alice E. Underwood’s book review of Masha Gessen’s journalistic work on the Russian feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot, whose famous trial and incarceration highlighted troublesome trends and anti-feminist attitudes in Putin’s contemporary Russia. Upcoming projects include an interview with professor and activist Susan Stryker concerning recent trends in transgender studies at the University of Arizona and in academia in general, as well as the historical and conceptual relationship between trans theory and queer theory. Further future topics for our Gender and Sexuality section will include the recent networked digital turn in the academic research and teaching of feminist, gender and sexuality, including their intersections with critical race and postcolonial studies, as well as digital pedagogy.
As more new topics and ideas start influencing the journal’s scope and focus, we embrace a wide variety of topics, theoretical approaches, ideas and interests, and warmly welcome readers’ suggestions. Contact boundary 2 with inquiries.
There is much to consider; and for those that missed the conference, or for those that would like to review its style and content: footage of the b2 lectures, readings, panels and discussions have been uploaded to the boundary2 youtube page. They will also be featured in a series on boundary.org. Always, we remain in humble engagement, our gratitude for the life, work and word of Edward Said resonating.
