The European Reception of John D. Caputo’s Thought: Radicalizing Theology 9781666908411, 9781666908428, 166690841X

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The European Reception of John D. Caputo’s Thought

The European Reception of John D. Caputo’s Thought Radicalizing Theology

Edited by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-66690-841-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-66690-842-8 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology in Europe: An Introduction Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci PART I: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS 1 Radical Theology as Political Theology: Exploring the Fragments of God’s Weak Power Calvin D. Ullrich Response to Ullrich John D. Caputo

1 17 19 40

2 A Radical Fidelity: John D. Caputo and the Future of Religion 45 Marie Chabbert Response to Chabbert 67 John D. Caputo 3 Is It Radical Enough?: The Ethical Call of Caputo’s Theopoetics to Stick to the Difficulty of Life in Light of Black Lives Matter Enrieke Damen Response to Damen John D. Caputo

v

73 90

vi

Contents

PART II: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC VERSUS HOPE AND LOVE 4 The Foolish Call of Love George Pattison Response to Pattison John D. Caputo 5 From Kenosis to Kenoma: The Enigma of a Place in Derrida and Caputo Agata Bielik-Robson Response to Bielik-Robson John D. Caputo 6 A Post-Belief Europe and the Offer of John Caputo Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor Response to French and Taylor John D. Caputo PART III: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY 7 The Call and the Cross in Caputo and Bultmann Rick Benjamins Response to Benjamins John D. Caputo 8 Caputo and the Unidentifiability of God Christophe Chalamet Response to Chalamet John D. Caputo 9 God—the Opportunity for Continued Discontent Jan-Olav Henriksen Response to Henriksen John D. Caputo PART IV: RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 10 Radical Theology’s Place within Theology Justin Sands Response to Sands John D. Caputo

93 95 108

113 131 139 148 153 155 169 175 191 199 212

215 217 232

Contents

11 Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong: Caputo’s Theopoetics of Event Erik Meganck Response to Meganck John D. Caputo 12 Hospitality in Action: A Question for Practical Theology? Pascale Renaud-Grosbras Response to Renaud-Grosbras John D. Caputo 13 Care and Decay: A Phenomenology of the Queer Body (with Constant Reference to the HIV-Positive Flesh) Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere Response to Cassidy-Deketelaere John D. Caputo

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237 257 261 270

275 292

Index 299 About the Editors and Contributors

303

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is always a challenge. Editing the book is a double challenge. We, the editors, must thank all the contributors for making our work relatively easy. It was a pleasure to work on this project with such a group of distinguished and brilliant people. Thanks must go to the publishing team of Lexington Books, their patience, helpfulness, advice, and hard work. Each chapter submitted to this volume underwent peer-review process on the level of editors and the anthology as the whole on the level of the publisher. John D. Caputo was a part of the editorial and peer-review process too as he agreed to comment and give a thorough response to each accepted chapter to this volume. We, the editors, would like to thank Jack for being very much involved in the preparation of this volume. Hence, we hope that this book will read not only as a scholarly engagement with the work of Caputo but also as an ongoing dialogue with one of the most prominent philosophers/ theologians of our time. The work on this book was generously supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as a partial result of the project “Revenge of the Sacred: Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe” [P 31919].

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John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology in Europe An Introduction Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci

WEAK AND RADICAL THEOLOGY: CAPUTO IN EUROPE John D. Caputo has recently proposed, after years of philosophical work in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, his own version of a radical theology. Since this “coming out as a theologian,” a number of books have appeared that develop this radical theology: The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (2013), The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (2015), and Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of the Difficult Glory (2019), being the main points of reference. We are now all awaiting for the volume to come later this year, which seeks to relate this radical or weak theology to the philosophical protagonists of our day: Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (2022). Caputo’s radical theology is said to focus less on rigid dogmatic formulas of traditional religion and focuses, rather, on ethical themes such as hospitality and openness to the stranger. Caputo’s work has gathered a significant amount of followers in the United States, where he is one of the main theologians today. This volume proposes to evaluate this new form of religion from out of the various religious and theological backgrounds from Europe’s main countries. Is only a rather secular mind-set able to welcome Caputo’s thinking or does it, rather, sit well with more traditional stance toward religion? The aim of this volume is to gather Catholic and Protestant voices around Caputo’s work to evaluate the match with the European context. To this end, we have invited scholars from all over Europe to reflect on their respective religious backgrounds and their relation with Caputo’s form of radical theology and so add to the European reception of Caputo’s radical 1

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theology. This introduction will present a short survey of the previous hospitalities to Caputo’s work, for this reception of Caputo’s work in Europe has been going on for quite some time: one of the first events, in this regard, must have been the Dutch translation of his On Religion in 2002. This probably was some sort of package deal with the publisher from the United Kingdom, Routledge, since all the other works in this series Thinking in Action, a series confronting major cultural phenomena such as the internet, film, and so on, were translated to Dutch as well.1 It is not until 2007 that serious academic reception took place. Here we, the editors, need to tip our hat to Lieven Boeve who was leading a then vibrant research community at the University of Leuven. In the academic year 2007–2008 a lot of leading scholars within the field of continental philosophy of religion and philosophical theology in the continental tradition came to Belgium to present their work to students. All of these authors were first introduced by young doctoral scholars. John D. Caputo was one of the scholars who presented his work to the Leuven students, as did for instance Kevin Hart and Graham Ward. Out of these events grew the book Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity (2010).2 It is perhaps no exaggeration that the idea for the present volume germinated there and then. At least three of the “students” present there have since published monographs that discuss Caputo’s radical theology. There is the work of us two editors3 but above all the monograph by the late Štefan Štofaník, still one of the most personal confrontations with Caputo’s theology to date, that needs to be mentioned.4 Around the same time Justin Sands’ monograph on Merold Westphal was published. Sands was part of said research group and his Reasoning from Faith likewise contains a chapter on Westphal’s debates with Caputo and, as most of us were asking those days, on the presence, still, of some sort of ontotheology and metaphysics in Caputo’s works.5 All of us were present that weary day in March 2008 that Caputo took the stage in Leuven and made the statement that “nobody trusts theology.”6 We the editors still recall the impact that sentence had on a bunch of young theologians—there must have been ten of them at a certain time—seeking their way within the academic field. Here was Caputo saying that no one trusts theology and, on top of that, that “there is good reason” for this disbelief in these so-called masters of belief. There is a gap, of course, between this academic reception and what the reception of radical theology might mean for religious communities. In this regard, when it comes to the European reception in a broader sense, it is good to know that this gap has been filled in, in the Low Countries at least, with the recent translation of his fascinating Hoping against Hope (2015), one more attempt of Caputo to escape the strict academic boundaries.7 The translation reached a second print soon and led to interviews with Caputo in major Dutch newspapers. Finally, we should acknowledge that the concept of “radical theology” is quickly

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gaining terrain in the Netherlands, to which the European Radical Theology Network may testify. Out of these networks, engineered by Wouter Nieuwenhuizen and Josef Gustafsson, the participation of Barry Taylor, who focuses on Caputo’s radical theology in an increasingly secular Europe, specifically in the present volume grew.8 Apart from this, introduction to radical theology, focusing both on the work of Caputo and of Žižek, has recently appeared.9 In this volume, however, Enrieke Damen and Rick Benjamins focus on Caputo’s relation to the Black Lives Matters movement in Europe and on the Protestant theological background of Holland, respectively. Translations of Caputo’s steps on theological terrain in French have equally been slow. Pascal Renaud-Grosbras, one of the contributors to this volume, will relate the events leading up to her translations of some chapters of The Insistence of God, two of which were presented in the journal issue she and Elian Cuvillier edited about Caputo’s theology.10 It seems that the French-speaking parts of Europe were first introduced to Caputo’s theology through a conference organized in Switzerland, in May 2013, on the topic of “The Wisdom and the Foolishness of God,” to which Caputo contributed by giving the key-note address. The importance of this event cannot be underestimated as it led to two journal issues focusing on Caputo’s oeuvre and to the eventual publication of the French translation of The Weakness of God.11 France, however, often suffices for the French: it is no wonder, then, that the theological domain established around Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque, for instance, never really engaged with Caputo’s work, Caputo’s critique of Marion notwithstanding.12 In Norway, reception of Caputo’s work crystallizes in a few journal articles13 and Jan-Olav Henriksen’s contribution to this volume will no doubt be important to make Caputo’s work more known in the North of Europe. Calvin Ullrich focuses in this volume on Caputo’s reception in Germany through discussing and criticizing the contributions to workshop resulting in the publication of a volume of essays called Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht in 2017.14 As far as we know the Spanish-speaking world has been served by the translation of The Weakness of God, in 2014 already, by Raul Zagarra.15 Considering that this translation opened up Caputo’s work in the Latin Americas more generally, we have not incorporated any Spanish authors in this volume. No European, however, is an island. Here too the reception of Caputo’s work echoes what happens in the English-speaking world. Two events here perhaps need to be mentioned. On the one hand, there was the debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ in which the latter criticized Caputo for not allowing the event to properly incarnate in a name and so missing out on the materialism that, for Žižek, is the only way forward after metaphysics.16 The critique triggered Caputo enough to respond

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with a chapter in his own The Insistence of God stating clearly that Žižek’s reading was based more on a “misunderstanding” than anything else.17 If, for Žižek, Caputo is not materialist enough and if for Žižek just any talk of God will somehow sometimes smuggle in an antimaterial instance to back up contingent materiality, then Caputo’s take on contingency is more of a hauntological flavor. There is no other matter than the matter here happening before us and the only materialism Caputo then allows is the “materialism of Martha,” responsible as it is for what might be happening, for the very materialization of events, not knowing whether or not it will do these events justice.18 This dialogue between Milbank and Žižek showed rather that at the time the theological landscape in the United Kingdom was dominated by Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement that sprang up in the wake of Milbank’s works. Domination, however, is not a word Caputo likes to use and the reception of his radical theology in the United Kingdom remained scarce. We hope that Marie Chabbert’s contribution to this volume might help to turn the tide and Calvin Ullrich’s chapter, by pointing to a material turn in Caputo’s recent work, adds to Caputo’s response to Žižek. On the other hand, there is a second publication that looms over the European reception of Caputo’s radical theology, namely the publication of Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister’s landmark Reexamining Deconstruction.19 Many of the contributions in this volume comport themselves to this high point in the reception of Caputo’s radical theology. On one point, however, Simmons and Minister seem to follow Žižek’s critique: whereas Žižek deplored the fact that Caputo was not materialist enough, Simmons and Minister critique Caputo for being too little of a materialist. The difference is small but significant: for Žižek not one historical contingency could properly be conceived by Caputo (except through supposedly having recourse to a God of the events), for Simmons and Minister the very presence of these historical contingencies is not sufficiently taken into account by Caputo. The worry, in this second case, is that the extant, material “religions with religion” are not being valorized properly by Caputo and his “religion without religion” is but a postmodern rephrasing of a Kantian noumenon once again forgetting the very concrete phenomena in which we breathe and with which we live, especially those of determinate religion. Simmons and Minister’s critiques voiced a suspicion that a great many, perhaps, at the time had over and against works, and our readers will see the contributions in this volume come back to this criticism time and again. We will see Renaud-Grosbras echo this suspicion from within practical theology: if not one religious practice can be understood as the religious practice, how then can we be certain that our religious practice is in fact a good practice? The unity of the European response we gather here will then soon shine forth. Two “trends,” as it were come to mind immediately: whereas earlier

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work on Caputo tended to focus indeed on the Kantian heritage of his weak and radical theology, in which his “religion without religion” was but a doublet, a religion within the limits of a weakened reason, of traditional religion, the chapters in this volume focus more on the positive contribution this weak theology can give to forms of traditional religion. Could it be that the Europeans gathered here, who have all witnessed in their own way the demise of traditional religion look to Caputo to strengthen their religious contexts again? A second concomitant trend is the shift from “weak” theology to “radical” theology. We have slowly seen emerging a theology in its own right in Caputo’s work: from a somewhat hesitant weak theology, which perhaps was indeed too reliant and contaminated by the forms of traditional religion which it sought to deconstruct, to a full-fledged radical theology which is, in this volume, being interrogated about its relation and contribution to everything that classical theology held dear: the incarnation, our salvation, our prayers, and so on. This volume, then, seeks to advance this move from “religion without religion,” as a somewhat second-order discourse to a radical theology that aids theology on its very own terms. The debates surrounding weak theology’s supposed mere inversion of metaphysical and traditional statement, where the omnipotent God for instance would be simply substituted with a “weak” God, make up for quite some chapters in this volume. Yet Caputo’s turn to a “radical” theology deserves our attention too. In The Folly of God, for instance, Caputo noticed that his is a radical theology, a theology that is not interested in the question of God per se, that has deeper interests even than God. Its only interest, and this is why it is close to thinking in a more philosophical and perhaps even Heideggerian sense, is in raising radical questions and in so prolonging the art of questioning.20 Quite some chapters in this volume will then trace this shift—this realization rather—in Caputo’s work. All of the chapters receive a response by Caputo in which he enters into dialogue with the questions arising from out of the European context. These responses are, quite rightly, configured as addresses, if not greetings, and we only hope that Caputo finds his greetings returned in the chapters we here offer in praise of his work.

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS Calvin Ullrich’s chapter, “Radical Theology as Political Theology: Exploring the Fragments of God’s Weak Power,” seeks to show how Caputo’s theology is not a prolongation of the formalism of a Kantian sublime but rather opens onto a materialist politics. Ullrich aims to do this by briefly recalling Caputo’s reception in Germany in most often hermeneutical theological circles and recent rather secular philosophies. Whereas the first seeks to retain more

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than just the “name of God” by clinging onto God’s omnipotence, the second tends to see in Caputo just an inversion of power where weakness now is the ultimate name of God. Over and against these German responses, Ullrich proposes to see a political theology at work in Caputo’s theology more straightforwardly: its messianic import is nowhere else than in a material engagement in the world. Caputo’s truth is a truth in the making, a “doing God” which binds God’s insistence to us and us to God. In conclusion, Ullrich urges Caputo to take one more step and move to a “cosmological reduction,” which at long last might shed the remains of an all too humanist tradition. Marie Chabbert’s chapter, “A Radical Fidelity: John D. Caputo and the Future of Religion,” focuses on who counts as faithful, who is in and who is out that is, so complicating the Christian response to the event of the call, central to Caputo’s radical theology. Hers is an account that stresses, not the identification of who counts as a Christian, as other chapters in the volume do, but rather to describe the responsibility of the theologian, radical or not, to take on the role of whistle-blower: theology is to be interrupted as soon as it becomes too self-assured and too certain when it comes to the question who counts as a Christian and who does not. Chabbert so seeks to portray the active contribution of Caputo’s theology to the formation and prolongation of Christian institution: Caputo, for Chabbert, is in the business of saving religion. Of particular note in Chabbert’s chapter is her sketch of the relation between Derrida and Caputo, which today in the literature has perhaps somewhat been understudied. For Derrida, the uncertainty regarding God lies in our act of naming God rather than in a supposed existence of such God as a proper referent. This is why atheism and theism, the one denying, the other affirming a particular naming of God, share the same troubles. Yet where this leads Derrida to a sort of indifference and to have some anxiety about which institution or tradition to subscribe to, and about how to do this, Caputo engages precisely a deconstructive practice from within religious institutions. Whereas Derrida was destined to remain “an outsider,” Caputo tries his very best to become Christian, to be part of the tradition while remaining critical about its practices, in short, to take the risk of naming God. Chabbert clearly shows how for Caputo “theology” has a more strict meaning than it did for Derrida, that a radical theology flows from Derrida’s deconstruction that Derrida, perhaps, did not foresee. On this score, Chabbert concludes, Caputo’s project of a radical theology is closer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity than it is to Derrida’s disengaged deconstruction. More than the other chapters in this volume, perhaps, Damen’s chapter, “Is It Radical Enough? The Ethical Call of Caputo’s Theopoetics to Stick to the Difficulty of Life in Light of Black Lives Matter,” underscores the continuity of Caputo’s recent radical theology with his earlier work. Damen in effect intimates that Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross is a variation of the (earlier)

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radical hermeneutics he had proposed. Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross, for Damen, is to be regarded not in the light of the dialectical victory in and through the resurrection but rather as a victory in defeat, as a radical siding with the victim. Caputo’s theopoetics, then, goes to the very roots of theology, to vulnerability of our lives, and the questions this poses. For Damen, this radical theology of the cross is inherently political and she makes a case for the ability of Caputo’s theopoetics to side with the victims of racial injustices, such as decried by the Black Lives Matter movement. For this, she here stages an intriguing dialogue between the work of Caputo and the womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas.

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC VERSUS HOPE AND LOVE George Pattison discusses “The Foolish Call of Love” in Caputo’s works. In an intriguing meditation, he relates Caputo’s account of the Folly of God to the narrative imaginations of such foolish rulings in Shakespeare’s character of Poor Tom in his King Lear and Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. The question Pattison poses to Caputo is what exactly these two figures might mean for our understanding of divine foolishness. In Shakespeare, Pattison finds an account that is close to Levinas’ later statements of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger being our masters. True mastery would then lie in an utter defenselessness. If Shakespeare so hints at our commiserating together on our account of being all “unaccommodated men,” Pattison turns to Dostoevsky to broach the question of salvation, by a reading of Dostoevsky’s Idiot as one of his allegories of Christ. It is here that the question of love surfaces as a “way” that trumps death—despite death even. This sheer possibility of living otherwise is what Pattison brings to, and finds in, Caputo’s œuvre. Yet this remarkable chapter ends with what seems a justified inquiry when it comes to the praise of the folly of love in Caputo’s theology: why does the tragedy of the human condition in his work remain so scarcely audible? Agatha Bielik-Robson’s chapter, “From Kenosis to Kenoma: The Enigma of a Place in Derrida and Caputo,” revisits a debate that could be observed in the literature for a little while now: are not the inversions of Caputo, simply substituting a weak God for a former strong God, playing the same old game on the same old playing ground but just in other terms? Can one not, instead of this inversion of metaphysical statements, find another, different way to proceed after metaphysics and move aside these terms that belong to a classical theism nonetheless? Bielik-Robson defends not the kenosis of faith, a faith forever weakening, one finds in Caputo (but where weakness itself thus always runs the risk of being yet one more spectacle of power) but rather a

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Marrano “religion without religion” she traces back to Derrida. Derrida was on the lookout for a God in retreat, for the tsimtsum one finds in the mysticism of Isaac Luria, from out of a kenomatic place that itself is not that easily circumscribed as divine or as the simple inversion of weaker and stronger gods. From this place, nonetheless, Bielik-Robson launches a question to Caputo’s radical theology: can it really move beyond the, however subtle, inversions of the constructions of the “palace theologians” it so tirelessly seems to deconstruct? Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor’s chapter, “A Post-Belief Europe and the Offer of John Caputo,” goes to the heart of this volume: what has Caputo’s radical theology to offer to Europe where, in general, the religious way of life is in decline? These authors speak of a re-enchantment of sorts, of a hope for something far more than the religious institutions have offered to satisfy the religious hunger. For this, the religious imagination has one again to be fed, and it is this exactly that John D. Caputo offers to us all. By liberating faith from the constraints of religious belief, French and Taylor argue Caputo reveals the “viable alternatives” to a seeking religious imagination. This radical theology, however, does not occur ex-nihilo: it starts with the remains, the remnants, and the residue of Christianity in Europe. For this reason, too, Caputo’s haunto-theology should be applauded—it deals with our past, with our determinate religions but from within a “dynamic of freedom” that welcomes what is new and to come.

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY Rick Benjamins, “The Call and the Cross in Caputo and Bultmann,” places Caputo’s radical theology in relation to the theology of the so-called Amsterdam School of the Dutch theologians Klaas Henrikse, Frans Breukelman, and Harry M. Kuitert. As many authors in this volume, Benjamins pays attention to the affirmative gesture in Caputo’s radical theology, which, perhaps more than Derrida’s deconstruction, seeks to move beyond an always unsettling operation. Benjamins in effect argues that our mundane reality, for Caputo, can give place to the event so implicitly shifting the attention from its call to the world which complies precisely to this call. Caputo’s turn to the material world (in its turn exemplified by his increasing Auseinandersetzung with Hegel) is evident by his sense for this finite world of ours, and that we are part and parcel of a cosmos destined to fade away. What sense, then, Benjamins asks, has an event that is “always to come,” in such a finite world? Everything hinges here, Benjamins argues on the status of the cross: is it a “nihilism of grace,” poured out for nothing and without why, as Caputo has argued or is, perhaps, more at stake here? For the latter, Benjamins brings Caputo’s

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thought into contact with that of Rudolf Bultmann who put the essence of Christian existence precisely in the realization that one is called rather in the identification (or not) of the call. Would it be not more important for Christians today to act as Christians because of their response to the cross rather than it is to respond somewhat agnostically to a call that literally would come from God knows where? Christophe Chalamet’s chapter, “Caputo and the Unidentifiability of God,” focuses likewise on a question arising from within the Christian tradition. Here the issue is again the identifiability of God, not so much from out of the Christian response to the call but rather from out of the doctrine of the incarnation, as God’s consent to become identifiable. It might not be, Chalamet argues, up to us to make God happen in the world. Rather, the Christian teaching states that God happened to the world. Following the lead of the tradition, this would save Caputo from putting such a heavy burden, and responsibility, on the human (and in each case all too human) response to the call of the divine. With this line of thought, Chalamet nonetheless approaches questions that pop up in many contributions of this volume: is Caputo’s shift from an ontology to an ethics or to a theopoetics not underestimating the essence of Christian theology? A God that would show up in being, that would be the very life of being, Chalamet argues, would ease the overburdening of the human response to God somewhat and so make room for a “dance” between the human and the divine. Jan-Olav Henriksen’s chapter, “God—The Opportunity for Continued Discontent,” looks for the affirmative and constructive character of Caputo’s radical theology rather than focusing on its deconstructive nature. Is not Caputo communicating, Henriksen asks, a specific experience of God or perhaps even delineating the conditions for such an experience to occur? For this, Henriksen turns to Caputo’s account of the practice of prayer. In prayer, specific understandings crystallize and take form within the world. Prayer, on Caputo’s reading, is not an automated response commandeered by a religious police but, in its very variety and multitude of ways, attention to the world, in which God is to take place. Prayers, like events, prepare the ground for something new. They pray exactly for something new in what happens. In this way, Henriksen intriguingly argues, prayers exemplify what one can call the quasi-transcendental operation of the event in Caputo: events are constitutive of the new, but are only found in what is constituted which so serves as their transcendental clue. The transcendental and the subjective desire for something external, something that is forever outside of its reach. This interplay between the subjective and the external, for Henriksen, is evident also in Caputo’s thinking of God. No philosophical (or theological for that matter) project can ever comprehend God. Caputo here approaches, Henriksen shows, the classical thought of a deus semper major. But such a

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negation, or deconstruction, of all ideas and images of positive religion actually mediates and contributes to the experience of God Caputo is trying to communicate. Henriksen so shows the positive role “religion” plays, and has to play, in any and all “religion without religion,” a point which is in effect too easily forgotten.

RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY Justin Sands’ chapter, “Radical Theology’s Place within Theology,” focuses on some philosophical and methodological questions about “reception”: how is Caputo’s work to be received in theology? If it does not want to identify as neither “fundamental theology” nor “liberation theology,” and not even as “contextual theology,” just what is it then? Sands argues for a transition, if not progress, in Caputo from a “weak theology” to precisely a “radical theology.” This would be, first, a theology that locates how our religious beliefs develop by always rupturing from within, and, second, from this rupturing takes precisely its activist posture. Sands then lays bare this radical theology by noting three fundamental principles in Caputo’s theology. A Protestant Principle forces this theology always to reconsider, or to reform; a Jewish Principle imposes its law to always deconstruct. Caputo adds, however, for Sands a third Catholic Principle: even if revelation in Jesus Christ is to be considered as final, exhaustive and, perhaps, exhausted, the reception of this revelation in our very lives is always still proceeding and so very much alive. These three principles make for the fact that radical theology turns into a theopoetics: this theopoetics answers to the directive of the revelation to make it happen as a way of life. In this way, radical theology is a corrective to the discipline of systematic theology: it seeks to preserve the spirit of what stirs theology to begin with, the life and practices of faith. To conclude, Sands hints at a community of these “theopoets,” as it were a thought of community that in Caputo’s work somewhat seems underexposed: it takes two to do justice to someone and something, as it always goes from me to you or from you to me. Erik Meganck’s chapter, “Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong: Caputo’s Theopoetics of Event,” explores Caputo’s relation to what one might call his predecessor in “weak thinking,” Gianni Vattimo. The chapter opens by remarking that whereas Caputo mentions Vattimo quite often, the latter does not mention Caputo’s weak theology at all. Secularization, for Vattimo, is the last and latest heir to Christianity. Yet whereas Vattimo subscribes, for the most part, to the Heideggerian “ontologization” of this history, it strikes Meganck that Caputo’s theopoetics moves into the opposite direction, namely

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of an almost anti-ontology of the event. Caputo so distances himself more and more from Vattimo. With Rorty, one needs to take an “ironic distance” from facts and names and the order of being in its entirety. Meganck closes his chapter by probing, like Sands before him, what precisely the status of this weak thinking in Caputo is if it does not entertain an ontology. Yet it is, for Meganck, neither an ethics nor a theology in the sense proper. Rather, Meganck applauds Caputo’s move toward a theopoetics as one more hermeneutical attempt to make sense of the event of world. Pascal Renaud-Grosbras’ chapter, “Hospitality in Action: A Question for Practical Theology?” thinks along with Caputo’s call to be hospitable to call of the unconditional, to responsibly respond to the event and form practices that can, and are able to, this event and this call. She therefore traces the fine line that earlier critiques of Caputo, such as Žižek’s, had already noted: the line between the name and the event. Is any practice at all suited to host this event? If all the democracies, for instances, are haunted from within by a democracy to come how are we to discriminate between good and bad democracies or even between less good and less bad democracies. Grosbras asks this question from within a specific, determinate Christian practice: can Christians ever be hospitable enough to the Christian God? If indeed there is a gap between the Gospel and Christian practices, how are we to conceive of better practices? Are not these practices in some way a shield for the immense responsibility that Caputo’s work lays on the human endeavor to be religious—a question that also surfaces in Chalamet’s chapter. With this stress on the importance of certain determinate practices, Grosbras is sure to aid in Caputo’s quest for “the becoming-radical of confessional theology.”21 Finally, Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere’s “Care and Decay: A Phenomenology of the Queer Body (with Constant Reference to the HIV-Positive Flesh)” returns to Caputo’s early work to consider what happened to Caputo’s promise to give us his account of the flesh in the volumes that were announced right after the publication of The Weakness of God. Cassidy-Deketelaere traces Caputo’s account of the flesh as precisely an experience of suffering, the failure as it were of the body to be phenomenology’s body proper. Fascinatingly, Cassidy-Deketelaere discovers one of Caputo’s favorite examples perhaps throughout his career, that of “people with AIDS.” Cassidy-Deketelaere then shows us a lingering Sartrean dimension in Caputo’s antiphenomenology of the flesh, for the flesh of the sick person here appears as repulsive and disgusting more than anything else. Cassidy-Deketelaere turns to Hervé Guibert’s description of what happens to the AIDS-ridden body, who, suffering from the disease himself, described his own body “as being taken over by that of an older man.” Yet in these accounts, and similar ones, one finds another dimension that is missing in Caputo’s account of the body and of flesh. Whereas Caputo, once again perhaps indebted to Sartre perhaps, describes the sick man

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and woman in his or her isolation, Cassidy-Deketelaere wants our attention for the communities of care that arise around the sick. The loss of humanity that Caputo detects in the experience of illness is nonetheless accompanied by the response of others who might so intimate a shared sense of vulnerability. In his conclusion, Cassidy-Deketelaere points to the work of Emmanuel Falque as someone who has taken up the question of the sick body in precisely this way. With these thirteen chapters, and replies of Caputo, we hope to add to, and so continue, the reception of Caputo’s work in Europe and, perhaps to offer a small contribution, who knows, to the radicalization of theology as well. NOTES 1. The series contained works by Slavoj Žižek, Simon Critchley, Richard Kearney and Hubert Dreyfus among others and was widely available in the Low countries. See John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001) and the translation Religie, translated by Arend Smidse (London: Uitgeverij Routledge, 2002). 2. Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (eds.), Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 3. See Martin Koci, Thinking Faith After Christianity: A Theological Reading of Jan Patočka’s Phenomenological Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020), 93–117, esp. 107–111 and Joeri Schrijvers, Between Faith and Belief: Toward A Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 133–222. 4. Štefan Štofaník, The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D. Caputo through Biographies and Events (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018). 5. See Justin Sands, Reasoning From Faith. Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018), 203–224 and “After Onto-Theology: What Lies beyond ‘The End of Everything’,” Religions 8 (2017), 98 and more recently his “Confessional Discourses, Radical Traditions: On John Caputo and the Theological Turn,” Open Theology 8 (2022), 38–49. 6. John D. Caputo, “The Sense of God. A Theology of the Event with Special Reference to Christianity,” in Between Philosophy and Theology, op. cit. 27–41, 27. 7. John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Translated, in Dutch, as Hopeloos hoopvol. Belijdenissen van een postmoderne pelgrim, translated by Irene Paridaans (Middelburg: Skandalon, 2017). 8. See http://ertn​.eu/. 9. See Rikko Voorberg, Gerko Tempelman and Bram Kalkman (eds.), Onzeker weten: Een inleiding in de radicale theologie (Utrecht: KokBoekencentrum Uitgevers, 2022). 10. See the issue entitled “Faiblesse de Dieu et deconstruction de la théologie,” Études Théologiques et réligieuses 90 (2015), 313–464 which contains an original essay by Caputo on “L’audace de Dieu. Prolégomènes sur une théologie faible,” 317–338. The first chapter of (what would become) The Insistence of God was

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partially translated by Corinne Laidet in Les Temps modernes 669–670 (2012), 274–288. 11. Apart from the issue in Études Théologiques et réligieuses, the francophone Swiss journal Revue de théologie et de philosophie 148 (2016), 505–531 published, after an introduction by Christophe Chalamet who is contributing to this volume too, Caputo’s key-note as “La faiblesse de Dieu: une théologie radicale à partir de Paul,” 507–531. The French translation of The Weakness of God then appeared as La faiblesse de Dieu. Une Théologie de l’événement, translated by John E. Jackson (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016). The proceedings of said conference were published in French as well as in English, see Hans-Christophe Askani and Christophe Chalamet (eds.), The Wisdom and Foolishness of God. First Corinthians 1-2 in Theological Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015) and, with the same editors, La sagesse et la folie de Dieu (Genéve: Labor et Fides, 2017). The latter volume reproduces Caputo’s key-note, adding a separate discussion, the former volume offers an essay by Caputo, entitled “The Weakness of God: A Radical Theology of the Cross,” 21–66. 12. Most notably in his “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion,” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 185–223. This essay was later translated in French, in a journal issue of Philosophie 78 (2003), 3–93 dedicated to Marion’s work. 13. See Knut Alfsvåg, “The Commandment of Love in Kierkegaard and Caputo,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 56 (2014), 473–488; Sasja Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God,” Open Theology 4 (2018), 658–674 and, by Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Thematizing Otherness: On Ways of Conceptualizing Transcendence and God in Recent Philosophy of Religion,” Studia theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology 64 (2010), 153–176. 14. See Rebekka A. Klein and Friederike Rass (eds.), Gottes schwache Macht: Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017). 15. See La debilidad de Dios: Une teología del acontecimiento, translated by Raúl Zegarra (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014). 16. Creston Davis (ed.), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 256–261. 17. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 136–164, 150. 18. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 163. 19. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (eds.), Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012). 20. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016), 1 and 19. 21. Caputo, Insistence of God, 61.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Alfsvåg, Knut. “The Commandment of Love in Kierkegaard and Caputo.” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 56 (2014), 473–488. Askani, Christophe, and Christophe Chalamet, Eds. La sagesse et la folie de Dieu. Genéve: Labor et Fides, 2017. Askani, Christophe, and Christophe Chalamet, Eds. The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1-2 in Theological Exploration. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Boeve, Lieven, and Christophe Brabant, Eds. Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Caputo, John D. Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Dutch translation: Hopeloos hoopvol: Belijdenissen van een postmoderne pelgrim. Translated by Irene Paridaans. Middelburg: Skandalon, 2017. Caputo, John D. “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion.” In God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon, 185–223. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Caputo, John D. “L’audace de Dieu. Prolégomènes sur une théologie faible.” Études Théologiques et réligieuses 90 (2015), 317–338. Caputo, John D. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001. Dutch translation: Religie. Translated by Arend Smidse. London: Uitgeverij Routledge, 2002. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. “The Sense of God. A Theology of the Event with Special Reference to Christianity.” In Between Philosophy and Theology, edited by L. Boeve and C. Brabant, op. cit. 27–41. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. French translation: La faiblesse de Dieu. Une Théologie de l’événement. Translated by John E. Jackson. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016. Spanish translation: La debilidad de Dios: Une teología del acontecimiento. Translated by Raúl Zegarra. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014. Chalamet, Christophe. “La faiblesse de Dieu: une théologie radicale à partir de Paul.” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 148 (2016), 507–531. Davis, Creston, Ed. The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Henriksen, Jan-Olav. “Thematizing Otherness: On Ways of Conceptualizing Transcendence and God in Recent Philosophy of Religion.” Studia theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology 64 (2010), 153–176. Klein, Rebekka A., and Friederike Rass, Eds. Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017.

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Koci, Martin. Thinking Faith After Christianity: A Theological Reading of Jan Patočka’s Phenomenological Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020. Sands, Justin. “After Onto-Theology: What Lies beyond ‘The End of Everything’.” Religions 8 (2017), 98. Sands, Justin. “Confessional Discourses, Radical Traditions: On John Caputo and the Theological Turn.” Open Theology 8 (2022), 38–49. Sands, Justin. Reasoning From Faith: Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018. Simmons, Aaron and Stephen Minister, Eds. Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Schrijvers, Joeri. Between Faith and Belief: Toward A Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016. Štofaník, Štefan. The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D. Caputo through Biographies and Events. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. Stopa, Sasja. “Seeking Refuge in God against God: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God.” Open Theology 4 (2018), 658–674. Voorberg, Rikko, Gerko Tempelman and Bram Kalkman, Eds. Onzeker weten: Een inleiding in de radicale theologie. Utrecht: KokBoekencentrum Uitgevers, 2022.

Part I

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS

Chapter 1

Radical Theology as Political Theology Exploring the Fragments of God’s Weak Power Calvin D. Ullrich

The task of this chapter will be to reflect on the “fragmentary” reception of Caputo’s weak theology in Europe, specifically Germany, but also necessarily due to the eventiveness of its fragmentary nature, without geographic limitations: thinking its shattering in different directions in search not of a comprehensive totality but for the positive openings it has created. Indeed, following the language of David Tracy, I would characterize Caputo’s work as a “frag-event” (fragmentary event) which negatively shatters and positively discloses a future-orientated hope, suggesting an approach to the “weakness of God”—God’s self-fragmentation—as a kind of political theology.1 Thus, what follows will be an exploration of God’s weak power presented as a collection of four brief fragments: (1) in the first fragment I begin with several speculative gestures for what I consider as the narrow reception of Caputo in the German theological context. (2) This is followed by an exceptional occasion where weak theology has been directly discussed and engaged. Here a recent volume of essays entitled, Gottes schwache Macht (2017),2 offers a series of perspectives critically attuned to the question of power in post-metaphysical descriptions of the doctrine of God according to notions of “weakness,” “event,” “negation,” and “absence,” while also probing whether this sequence of consonant terms can fruitfully be deployed within Christian theology. Reference is made to two contributions of Martin Hailer and Alexander Maßmann as a foil to develop my own interpretation of Caputo’s political theology. (3) At the heart of this interpretation pursued in the third fragment is that Caputo’s ontological topology of transcendence—the event/the messianic—does not intend to court the abstraction of a postmodern Kantian sublime,3 where the presentation of the messianic is 19

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a formalist happening which knocks us over in sheer unexpectedness, but rather that it commences an opening for freedom coherent with a materialist politics. The latter, however, is something of a latent occurrence within Caputo’s oeuvre and undergoes a conceptual transformation in the works that follow The Weakness of God (2006).4 (4) In the short concluding fragment within this re-articulated schema, I momentarily connect with the notion of the “cosmological reduction,” to locate new sites for the fragments of God’s weak power in new materialism, philosophy of science, and affect theory.

FRAGMENT 1: SPECULATIONS There are possibly several reasons for the limited reception of John D. Caputo’s “weak theology” in Germany.5 A few speculative gestures, therefore, are worthwhile to furnish some context. For starters, even if it has become passé to speak of the citational insularity of some corridors in German academic theology, one should not ignore the fact that theology (and philosophy) finds its element in a so-called language of origin, which is to say that the effect of there being to date, quite remarkably, no German renditions available yet of Caputo’s theological works is probably not as insignificant as one might expect.6 Not unrelated, is the matter historical accident, wherein weak or radical theology is at its genesis a thoroughly American (and British) phenomenon, to which Caputo himself is something of a relative latecomer.7 One cannot trace all the lines of thought here, but if we were to retroactively situate weak or radical theology in the trajectory of the death-of-God movement of the 1960s, then this was mostly a marginal fad inspired predominantly by Paul Tillich and his American reception (Thomas Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton). Caputo has articulated his own connection to Tillich more recently,8 but his influence on radical theology is more properly situated in continuity with the American postmodern theology of the 1970s and 1980s—the first to bring Derrida into conversation with theology (Carl Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist). The relation between religion and other European philosophers operating predominantly within the French phenomenological tradition (Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion), again, typically an Anglo-American fascination, culminated in the Villanova Conferences organized by Caputo throughout the 1990s, also the time when he published his influential Prayers and Tears (1997). The counter-reception of this so-called “theological turn in phenomenology” in the German-speaking world is certainly underway, but the presence of Caputo in these discussions is not central.9 Thirdly, it is also the case that there are those traditions in German theology which have already addressed at least one fundamental problematic of

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a “postmodern theology,” namely, metaphysics. Here the gleaned insights from hermeneutic phenomenology are developed into a hermeneutical theology in the Bultmannian lineage after Martin Luther and Karl Barth and its wake in the works of Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling, and Eberhard Jüngel.10 Sharing with weak theology in several antipathies toward metaphysics—memorably captured by Jüngel’s dictum that “God’s being is in becoming”11—hermeneutical theology like weak theology rejects thinking of God as timeless being or an ahistorical entity; it refuses the metaphysics of systems over particularity and context and situates human speaking about God in the temporalization of language that opposes objectification.12 The relationship between weak theology and hermeneutical theology may indeed present fresh intellectual explorations according to the apparent contiguity of these points, but stark differences do persist. Recognizably distinctive is that in opposition to an event of unique historicity by which human beings are constituted in the “ever-coming, every-encountering God,”13 weak theology brackets the identity of this encountering event, deploying the “name” of God as only one of several possibilities. This may be why Ingolf Dalferth’s neo-Barthian revivification of this hermeneutical tradition in his own Radical Theology makes a concerted effort to distinguish Caputo’s approach as a “deepening . . . of a secular perspective”14 from one that addresses everything in the light of the presence of God and within the horizon of reorientation from “nonfaith or unfaith (unbelief) to faith (belief).”15 Finally, and in connection with this hermeneutic tradition but perhaps in closer step with weak theology, is the basic rejection of an omnipotent, all-powerful, and ultimately apathetic God, which resounded throughout the writing of the “new” German political theologians of the 1970s. With Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer again in the background, a certain theistic conception was already being displaced by the notion of God emerging primarily from the relations of the Trinity and subsequently qualified by a theology of the cross, making way for a powerless (weak) God that exists in the midst of suffering and injustice.16 More could be said of the influence of the new political theologians and their impact on later liberation, feminist, black, and eco-theology, and especially the productive tension forged with death-of-God theology and today’s radical theology more broadly, but the emphasis here usually falls outside of the German context, particularly in the Americas and the global south.17 It should also be noted in this regard, that while political issues are not fixed to a particular context, the radical or weak theology that has become most prevalent in North America is also situated in, and partially responsive to, a very specific set of cultural conditions—alt-right politics, racism, evangelicalism, mass consumerism, etc.—the likes of which are simply not seen to the same extent in Western Europe (broadly speaking).18

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Whatever weight is given to these speculations, it remains the case that “weak theology” has not received much of a hearing in Germany. Why, then, respond to this solicitation in the first place? I would like to suggest that because of this apparent absence one should note the exceptional instances where weak theology has come into focus from a German perspective and, consequently, since they raise specific thematic concerns, these exceptions have the favorable quality of amplifying Caputo’s theological inventiveness in a particular way: that is to say, in this chapter—as the following fragments hope to show—precisely as a resource for political theology and to a more experimental degree, as an affective matrix which plays closer attention to the animality of the religious body, dovetailing with recent discussions in new materialism, philosophy of science, and affect theory.

FRAGMENT 2: GOD’S WEAK POWER A research workshop held at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in 2016 culminating with the publication Gottes Schawche Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht offers the reader a wider engagement with the panorama of “weak” thinking in the German theological context. The familiar names of the new Paulinism emerge in the contributor’s discussions:19 Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, and John Caputo, as well as their French antecedents, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In the editors’ introduction, Rebekka Klein and Friederike Rass account for the powerful theological critiques of omnipotence in modern times from the likes of Barth and Bonhoeffer; however, the question that motivates the volume is whether and to what extent these apparently recent secular philosophies can positively connect with, or should be rejected by, Christian theology. For Klein and Rass, if classical Christian theism offers a portrait of omnipotence (Allmacht) and its theological critique centers around God’s co-suffering or impotence (Ohnmacht), then they present God’s weak power (schwache Macht) as a figure of “the third.”20 What is crucial to this tertium quid is that the concept of power must itself undergo a transformation; for despite the relativizing claim that God’s power disenchants the powers of this world and thus liberates the oppressed, this sovereign power can still be understood as the ontological grounding of reality and thus “metaphysical” or “onto-theo-logical” in the sense in which Heidegger described in Identity and Difference.21 The philosophical-theological questioning of God’s power, therefore, opens onto the various possibilities for political theology after the death of God—that is, instead of a politics of dialectic, one turns to subversion, deconstruction, process, and absence to think anew the political meaning of the event of God’s withdrawal.22 Several

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of the essays, then, while not directly invoking political theology, interrogate the meaning of God’s power as it relates to God’s being beyond the structure of causality, that is, causa sui or Ursache. Martin Hailer’s contribution “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” for example, points to two “marginal” discussions from the tradition: on the one hand, “process thought,” which replaces substance ontology for God’s weak power as a creative entanglement with the world, and on the other, instances from German Idealism, particularly Schelling, for whom, contra-Hegel, there is a moment of becoming in God that is foreign to Godself, preserving the freedom of the new.23 Secondly, Hailer counterposes a Schleiermachian liberal theology that conceptualizes God’s power as a “continual phenomenon” in the “natural context” of the world, to a Barthian conception, later systematized by Jüngel, of God’s weak power that combines its eventful surprising character and covenantal faithfulness. For Hailer, what is preserved by Barth and Jüngel, over and against models of causality, is a more accurate rendering of reality not discovered as a seamless process but orientated toward openness and to the events of the possible. Nevertheless, for him there is a hard bifurcation between reality and possibility in the Barthian-Jüngel heritage which relegates the third-way option: “What remains unthought, is that a state of reality could contain within itself potencies of possibility.”24 It is at this point that Caputo’s weak theology is invoked alongside the “weak thinking” of his erstwhile collaborator, Gianni Vattimo. Unlike Vattimo, for whom the selfabasement of God in kenosis culminates in the humanizing process of secular modernity, Caputo’s interpretation of God’s weak power wants to maintain the immanent transcendence of the tout autre.25 With a critical eye to this wholly other, Vattimo’s “weak thinking” which accompanies the Christian telos of secularization refuses the need for these philosophies of transcendence, since they are purportedly akin to a “tragic and apocalyptic Christianity”26 which devalues the present with their obsessional turn toward the Other. Caputo’s hermeneutic corrective, as Hailer rightly states in response to Vattimo—and this will be central for our discussion in fragment three—is to say that the event is not a rupture from “without,” but instead events “appear in the ordinary course of the world without, however, being absorbed into it.”27 Here the ontological determination of events for Caputo always occurs within the world but without being absorbed into it, since any description the world gives to the event would be exceeded by the event. Hailer follows this with two important formulations which are instructive for our purposes: first the evental giving is like a secularized grace or a “grace without God,” and secondly, this inner-worldly grace, he says, “could be called a natural theology of events.”28 In both cases, Hailer is referring to Caputo in discussion about the precise character of the event, the former inflected by Alain Badiou (“laicitized grace”) and on the other by Gilles Deleuze (“grace is all”), who

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is closer to Derrida for Caputo.29 Keeping this tension in mind between the event as an exceptional occurrence on the one hand, and the event as that which is “waiting everywhere and in everything”30 on the other, let us turn to the essay by Alexander Maßmann, replaying this tension through an index that more visibly asks after the political implications of God’s weak power. Maßmann’s, “Macht und Ohnmacht in John Caputos Gottesbild,” polemically asserts that Caputo’s weak power of God falls prey to what he calls a “reformist tragedy” (reformistischen Tragik), that is, in its struggle to overcome the injustices of the world, this concept of “weakness,” on the one hand, might confound the dominating power of a God entangled in the structures of political legitimation, but that on the other, “weakness” inevitably slides into a “powerlessness,” and thus finds itself tragically lost in day-to-day politics, compromised, and re-legitimizing the inequalities of those very structures.31 How so? For Maßmann the issue is a properly a political one; for God’s weak power must come to have an “effective” political outcome in the present, and for him, this is a question of how one interprets Caputo’s depiction of the anarchy of the spirit. After reporting on Caputo’s disillusionment with the totality claims of metaphysical theology and its concomitant authoritarian religion, Maßmann summarizes Caputo’s weak theology as the synthesis of the Jesus traditions of the Synoptics and philosophical Paulinism (already referred to above). Through the hyperbolic sayings of Jesus and the folly of the cross that upends the logic of the world, God becomes the possibility of the world’s deconstruction—its corresponding orders, privileges, and strong theologies are all revealed as contingencies. However, the weak power of the event, or God’s Hier(an)archie, is for Maßmann nothing more than an agitating coefficient for existing conditions; it does not aim at fundamentally altering the system itself.32 Maßmann is right to point out that Caputo does not intend to revert to a new system of political anarchy which would simply invert the power differential, but he is wrong to assume, as he says, that this produces a peculiar conservatism.33 My contention is that Maßmann’s reading of Weakness of God is paradigmatic of a larger semantic confusion between the language of weakness and event— where the latter is construed as an abstract essence, a power-less ideality— and therefore an ineffectual resource on the plane of ontic political forces.34 Instead, I would propose not only that “the event” in Caputo’s weak theology does have material political consequences, but that this outcome is only possible precisely because Caputo’s understanding of the event of the Kingdom of God—what he calls the “Sacred Anarchy”—is of an order not beyond immanence and force, but of a new poetic practice that redescribes these terms just as it asks us to engage reality in virtue of them. In other words, Maßmann fails to grasp the specific character of the tertium quid—that is, between the duality of domination and powerlessness, where the “weakness”

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of God encountered in the event of God’s withdrawal is experienced not as a “monstrous” sublime but as an urgent solicitation for action. The intimation of God’s weakness as paralysis is confirmed and made more explicit when Maßmann appears to take Caputo’s theopoetical reading of the Sermon on the Mount literally. While nonetheless affirming a “tone of irony” he says that Caputo asks us to “remain passive” (passiv bleiben)35 as we hope for the event of God—not worrying about canceling our debtors’ debts and abandoning provision for one’s own security, for only then do we remain open to the event. Since this “mad economics”36 is stricto sensu impossible, we are left with our quotidian worries just as we are not to worry about the worries of the future. What frustrates Maßmann about the “poetics of the impossible” is that its abstraction resides in Caputo’s inability to demonstrate conclusively that reality is transformed. Because the impossible can never “reach us,” Caputo ends up with a compromise that must affirm the essential goodness of present arrangements no matter how miserable life is. The slippage according to Maßmann, is that Caputo is trafficking in a kind of dualism which runs throughout Weakness of God, between activity/passivity, strength/weakness—rendering any activity here in the present meaningless. Maßmann writes: “This is also related to the fact that Caputo reduces the guiding distinction of his book to a binary. Strength is the ability to physically effect something in the world according to one’s own desire, and weakness is the inability.”37 The focus and ultimate reduction of Caputo’s weak theology to a division between opposing forces of power misses some of the fundamental aporetic tensions of deconstruction (“passive decision,” “responsible irresponsibility,” “gift without givenness,” etc.)38 which is difficult to reconcile with Caputo’s carefully argued earlier work,39 and ignores the texture of the (quasi-)phenomenological intensity and passion of experience he is attempting to articulate.40 For Caputo, this texture is articulated as “[t]he full intensity of experience, the fullest passion, [which] is attained only in extremis, only when a power . . . is pushed to its limits.”41 Indeed, when power reaches its limit and “breaks,” it opens onto a weakness which is a power of a different sort—an immobilization of power by which “movement is mobilized” and carried out in “the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order.”42 Hailer and Maßmann’s reflections on God’s weak power both recognize that the reduction of classical theism to the event or silent call of God is not a reformulation of this power into a new entitative force, but they are nevertheless left unsatisfied with its material clarification for the possibilities of temporal change. Hailer, in fact, concludes by preferring Giorgio Agamben’s approach for its realized eschatological (“seized chronos”)43 perspective: “Agamben thus primarily thematizes the receiver side of the call, while Caputo focuses his attention on the ontological implications of the sender side.”44 Agamben’s influential The Time That Remains (2000), which is

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interested in living in the form of the Messiah, is regarded by Hailer as closer to Caputo’s position insofar as a decentered subject is addressed by the weak call. However, if Caputo’s emphasis falls on the “sender side” (Senderseite), then Agamben’s “receiver side” (Empfängerseite) is, for Hailer, more attuned to the unrepresentable but nevertheless experienceable kairotic messianic time—a time that remains—not completely removed from normal time but not identical with it. In the case of Maßmann, on the other hand, the final analysis for him is that the weakness of God is found in the social dimension of the proclamation of the Christ-event, which does not eliminate difference into a new universality, but preserves both Jews and Greeks in their specificity just as they participate plurally in the unity of the Spirit.45 Maßmann’s appeal to the Corinthian vision of plurality-in-unity where the criterion for honoring the weak and outcast always persists supposedly offers an alternative to Caputo’s Hier(an)archie where the event in its unknowability could destroy what is worth preserving.46 Responding to Hailer and Maßmann’s readings within the wider context of the issues raised above, I would like to offer my own interpretation of Caputo’s political theology of the messianic, which pays special attention to the this-worldly emancipatory potential of God’s weak power. FRAGMENT 3: POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF THE MESSIANIC Caputo’s weak theology has a certain proximity to the prophetic spirit of the “new” political theology already alluded to, though distinguished from it in important ways.47 On my reading, weak theology is political theology,48 and can be understood as an innovation of the predicate of omnipotence which is critically opposed to a philosophical theism as well as to an inversion that inscribes the renunciation of power as the very being of God. The weakness of God in weak theology cannot amount to this kind of aestheticization of suffering, tragically sublimated into the self-comprehending movement of the absolute—as Johann Baptist Metz argued forcefully against Jürgen Moltmann49—but rather, it accommodates what I would call Caputo’s own political theology of the messianic.50 God’s self-fragmentation in the crucifixion is not the impotent counterpoise to the omnipotence of God, neither does it refer to the heroic moment of love that finally denies suffering in a sudden apocalyptic event nor is it a pure co-suffering (mit-leiden) ultimately failing the test of theodicy. A political theology of the messianic is a fundamental reorientation or reduction of the concept of power (sovereignty) as well as of the ontological grounding of reality itself that is given its discursive shape in a philosophical-theological anarchism (sacred anarchy) emerging

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from within/as theological communities of responsivity. Before expanding on some of these claims, I want to begin by returning in more detail to the semantic confusion referred to earlier—that is, the reduction of weakness/ the event to an opposing force—because it attends to the implications of the (mis-)readings repeated by the likes of Hailer and Maßmann and is, in part, also behind Caputo’s shifting semantic regimes that occur later in The Insistence of God (and again in Cross and Cosmos). In the intervening years following The Weakness of God, several volumes and critical essays appeared attempting to make sense of Caputo’s move from a continental philosophy of religion to his quasi-theology. Capturing the mood and merging with the concerns of Hailer and Maßmann, the collection titled, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (2012), gave common voice to a line of criticism which argued broadly that Caputo’s weak theology or “religion without religion” was too focused on an ahistorical and indeterminate religion at the expense of determinate historical forms.51 We are unable to replay these arguments here in full or Caputo’s capacious response,52 but briefly put, these critics were left uneasy about the status of “material’ religion within such a “thin” concept of a theology of event. Stephen Minister, for example, writes, “[m]y primary concern is not that ‘religion without religion’ is a bad idea, but that Caputo’s ‘religion without religion’ seems to emphasize the ‘without’ more than the ‘religion’.”53 In registering and responding to these anxieties Caputo concedes, however obliquely, that “these commentators have been misled by the whimsy with which I say certain things.”54 This pertains in my reading to Caputo’s “second-order discourse” of theopoetics, which is misconstrued as offering a detached religious reflection at the expense of the content upon which it draws. Behind these assertions Caputo suspects that theopoetics is being treated as a set of propositional claims about religious truth; of being interested in the “what” instead of the category of the “how” of religious truth which gets itself articulated in several “ways”—the way in which the world worlds (à la Heidegger). Readers of Caputo will recognize in these concerns the much-discussed foi and croyances distinction developed by Derrida in the “Faith and Knowledge” essay and an important feature already in Caputo’s Prayers and Tears.55 In fact, it was in the context of the latter that this question of the “with” and “without” in a “religion without religion” was first raised and responded to, and so it is curious circumstance that it resurfaces again in the theological register of The Weakness of God.56 But here we should also draw attention to the messianic–messianism distinction, because it is precisely at this point in Prayers and Tears where Caputo announces the one “criticism, if it is one, of Derrida,”57 and the place we can cite as a response to the one criticism of Caputo in the Weakness of God, if it is one. In short, Caputo believes that the distinction between the various determinate

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messianisms and a pure messianic in general doesn’t hold up on Derrida’s own terms, and that there is a Kantian trap that Derrida has stepped into. The difficulty lies in the fact that the possibility of the messianic and the particular messianisms are treated as distinct “entities” and thus mimic the entire problematic of the particular-universal/fact-essence polarity. Despite the complications of Derrida’s language, Caputo asserts that on Derrida’s own terms the “messianic in general” is not a regulative ideal toward which we asymptotically move—that is, we can never “live” or “dwell” in that which is to come, if that means the avoidance of our present conditions. The messianic, then, should rather be interpreted in the positive sense as an “affirmation of and engagement in the world,” and even though it is desert-like it “enjoys a great deal of the life of the historical messianisms, of their historical hope, of their religious affirmation of something to come, a great deal of the energy of engagement.”58 In a political theology of the messianic, therefore, Caputo explicitly takes into account that any serious temporal structure of the messianic cannot be effectively based on a messianic purity, a “true” messianic in general or a sublime alterity, for that would strictly have the “form of absolute inhospitality, of uninhabitability.”59 In the language of the “Faith and Knowledge” essay, religion without religion is not simply a postmodern Kantian revision, akin to a “religion within the limits of reason alone,” which stands opposed to any determinate hopes made available through the revelation of Christian faith. On the contrary, Caputo is unambiguous about the way to get beyond the Heideggerian distinction between “revelation” and “revealability,” encapsulated in “Faith and Knowledge” by the notion of foi. Foi is that kind of archi-faith that if left by itself (a pure messianic indeterminacy) remains empty, and so should be comprehended “hauntologically” as that which disturbs the determinate faiths (croyances). Many are of course uncomfortable with the ambiguity of this Derridean paleonym, and just as the rhetorical effect of Prayers and Tears seems to have emphasized the “without” at the expense of the “with”—contrary to a closer reading—the same criticism, if it is one, could be said of the rhetorical effect of the whimsical language of theopoetics in The Weakness of God, what one could call Caputo’s own “residual Kantianism.”60 So it is that whether the “mad economy” of God’s weakness or the “sender-side” of the event, the question of the hope that the Kingdom of God brings for the present remains unanswered for Caputo’s critics. Thus, to clarify the contours of a political theology of the messianic, we must press further into the fragments: of “sacred anarchy,” the theopoetics which accompanies it, and the series of conceptual innovations and external developments that follow The Weakness of God. For while the centrality ascribed to the “without” (ohne warum, sans) in Caputo’s corpus is unmistakable, the corresponding implications for human responsibility and action appear ambiguous.

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If the theistic connotation of sovereignty and power associated with the name of God are reduced to the weak or silent call of the “event,” then it follows that the kingdom over which a God without sovereignty reigns can no longer follow an “archic paradigm” (monarchical, hierarchical, or eternal).61 In its place must be a kingdom that denies and replaces all principles of control and expressions of arkhé for an alternative an-archic kingdom of the kingdom-less. This “Kingdom of différance”62 is not the simple anarchic opposite of a kingdom with sovereign rulership—one of disorder and chaos—but as an-archic or a sacred anarchy, it now takes on a positive political meaning. In this reimagining “God” becomes the dismantling and fragmentary movement of the archic paradigm where power is not rejected as such but redescribed as the refusal of the domination and abuse of power. God’s “significance” is therefore found in a metapolitical dimension of transcendence that is carved out within immanence. For Caputo, it is in the sayings of Jesus and his death on the cross where the “frag-events” of the oppressed, their “memory of suffering” as Benjamin would say, are proclaimed to impel unyielding solidarity and justice. What is needed to expose the disruptive forces within these texts and frag-events is likewise, not a governing theo-logic, but a theopoetics: a creative discourse (poieisis) on God, where the call or event is brought into words but also includes the bringing of these words into reality, that is, responding with words and deeds—literally doing God, or what we might now call the intertwining of theopoetics and theopraxis.63 In this way, we are reconfigured by the exposure to this impossible sacred anarchy just as we configure the world according to it, we enter a procedure of a different way of being and interpreting the world, of thinking and creating the genuine (im) possibility of the world otherwise, within the actual world. With the emphasis on poiesis, doing God, and theopraxis, a this-worldly active and transformative venire is added to a political theology of the messianic, and which is responsive to the criticisms of the Kantianism still lingering after Weakness of God and to the ongoing developments in contemporary philosophy. This of course all culminates in Caputo’s Insistence of God (2013) and is evident in several elaborations that constitute what I would call, with hesitation, Caputo’s “materialist turn,” two moments of which deserve mention. (1) In his new “theology of perhaps,” the subtitle of the book, Caputo builds on Derrida’s formulation of peut-être (may be) to once again draw us into another “irreducible modality” which is of a different register to the simple present or future-present.64 The “perhaps” is like the reduction of the name of God to the event and maintains its messianic futurity, “it may happen” or it may not. But while its function is the same as the event—the principle without principle which inspires the “ability to sustain uncertainty and to venture into the unknown”65—the semantic regime it draws together

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“tightens” the tension between the call and response, between a weak force and human responsibility. This is evident in the new term which replaces the weakness of God, namely, the “insistence” of God and its chiasmic relation to “existence.”66 Caputo writes that the structure of God’s insistence, is “not a double bind but a double binding or mutual intertwining, of God to us and of us to God, each in need of the other.”67 Indeed, not only does God not exist but rather God’s insistence is required for the world to exist, for the world is always already responding to the insistent call: “God’s insistence needs our existence to make any difference. Our existence needs God’s insistence in order to have a difference to make.”68 (2) Alongside the accent given to the dynamic relationship between the event and the response, possibly Caputo’s most surprising conceptual innovation in this “materialist turn” is the move he makes from Kant to Hegel. If the former inflected his religion without religion and the initial explorations into weak theology, then the latter—not without a Derridean twist—is the more radical point of reference for a truly postmodern account of theology that is concerned with matter.69 Indeed, Hegel is behind all the revolving excursions with the primary interlocutors of this book. From Malabou (plasticity) to Žižek (dialectic), Milbank (paradox), and Meillassoux (correlation), the issue is persistently the effort to materialize the theopoetics of the event—to “burn away” the residual Kantianism and to give the “tout autre character of the call” a representation not from another world beyond, but of “another worlding of the world.”70 Hegelian Vorstellungen—the representative “world-picture, [or] world-praxis”71—which mediates the truth of Spirit in pictoral form before achieving pure self-conscious thought (Begriff), is not the latent conceptual content of Absolute Spirit, for Caputo, but rather the revelation of an event of poieisis, which in radical theology is the lifeform or world-disclosure structured by God’s anarchic Kingdom. Theopoetics here manifests a potentiality of an event that calls for an impossible ethical-political alteration of all human sociality, the efficacy of which is produced and stimulated by this symbolic and imaginative discourse. So far from creating an exception out of the material realm, or “conserving” hegemonic interests, this radical form of political theology is designed to emphasize that all there is is matter, and if theopoetics gives voice to a different order of signification, then it is up to us to respond—to be the “coming” of the messiah and to take responsibility for “the rigors and demands of the à venir.”72 Examples of this political theology of the messianic take shape precisely in the pluriform practices, rituals, and disciplines of individuals and communities: whether in the figure of Martha’s attending to the physical needs of Jesus, or those acts of civil solidarity in the face of the State’s failure to meet the needs of those most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.73

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CONCLUDING FRAGMENT: THE COSMOLOGICAL REDUCTION Caputo’s work has made possible the radical reimagining of the nature of religion and Christian theology and poses a challenge to the hegemonic political theologies of our time, whether sovereign politics, racial white supremacy, capitalism, or environmental domination. As indicated above, despite the nominal reception of Caputo’s “weak theology” in Germany, similar tensions have followed throughout the positive development (fragmentation) of his theological corpus, but with the latter being clarified along the way in response to the leading voices in (radical) theology as well as to accommodate the latest philosophical trends. In this I am in agreement with someone like Clayton Crockett, for whom Caputo’s radical interpretation of religion will be foundational for the ongoing discussion between theology, continental philosophy of religion, and movements like new materialism, environmental studies, and affect theory.74 If I have spoken of this “materialist turn” in Caputo’s thought, however, I do not mean in the strong sense of a philosophical overhaul, but rather another fragmentary perspective of “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbts) articulated in an idiom (what Crockett, following Malabou, calls a “motor scheme”) which expresses “the broadest information of a time period or epoch.”75 Therefore, if the structure of a political theology in Caputo’s weak theology does not deny the material world but speaks to a “natural theology of events”—the exceptional and accidental occurrences that come to existence—then aren’t we now poised to ask the tradition which has culminated in the so-called “theological turn” to shed its humanistic (and masculine) sympathies?76 Caputo’s latest work, in part III of the Insistence of God and again in part II of Cross and Cosmos, certainly suggest as much.77 In both cases he extends his notion of theopoetics to what he calls a “cosmo-theo-poetics”—the poetics of the insistent call of the (material) world. Caputo suggests with reservation that this notion “could be formulated in terms of a ‘religious materialism’,”78 which means, for a theology which is eminently incarnational, that Jesus as the “human animal” deconstructs the oppositions between materialism and idealism, human and nonhuman, subject and object. The “divinanimality” which we are, to cite Derrida, expands the model of insistence of the tout autre to the nonliving, to every material thing that lays claim on us. If, in a theopoetic reduction all ontotheological claims cease, in favor of another order of being claimed by something we know not what, then, in what we could now call a “cosmological reduction,” the priority of the human is waylaid by the forces, intensities, accidents, and incidents of the cosmos which act upon us and which we are.

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In this final fragment I want to suggest that another frag-event of God’s weak power is to be found in the ongoing and lively discussions concerning the body, new materialism, and affect theory.79 The latest texts of Caputo’s go beyond the interlocutors already mentioned by including animated debates with philosophers of science (Bruno Latour, Michel Serres), eco-theo-feminists (Catherine Keller), and new feminist materialists (Karen Barad). This family of thinkers is interested in a non-reductive materialism which takes science seriously by treating our relationship with the world as but one field of encounters between an infinite series where the world is already interpreting itself.80 Caputo’s innovation is to say that the cosmo-theopoetics of the cosmological reduction is an insufficient “aestheticism” if it does not take seriously the thing itself (Sache), which for him is metaphysics; a thinking after physics—“heeding the new physics.”81 The model for this radical nonreductive materialism—Caputo goes as far as to name a “weak metaphysics”—is none other than the theologia crucis, which means dealing with the difficulty (of the cross), not covering over what the new science is telling us. If theology is fundamentally about reconciliation, reconciling the human and the nonhuman to God, then this reconciliation is fragmented and without a desire for a primordial unity. It is an affirmation of an irreducible multiplicity and novelty for “all things to be made new.”82

NOTES 1. David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of our Time: Selected Essays, Volume I (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 1–8. Derrida disagreed with Tracy on his concept of the fragment, in the 1997 meeting of the Villanova “Religion and Postmodernism” Conference, suggesting it too often implied the memory of a system or whole. Tracy stressed that he meant the Benjaminian messianic sense of the fragment, which defies teleological thinking. This is of course the sense in which I am using it here. See David Tracy, “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of our Times” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 170–84. 2. The publication follows an academic workshop convened by Rebekka A. Klein and Friederike Rass in Halle-Wittenberg in 2017, see Rebekka A. Klein and Friederike Rass (Hrsg.) Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017). Klein is an important voice in the German discussion of weak thinking and its relationship to systematic theology and political theory. Both Klein and Rass were associated with the University of Zürich and both former doctoral students of Ingolf Dalferth. See Rebekka Klein’s, Depotenzierung der Souveränität. Religion und politische Ideologie bei Claude Lefort, Slavoj Žižek und Karl Barth (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), and Friederike Rass, Die Suche nach Wahrheit im Horizont fragmentarischer Existenzialität (Tübingen: Mohr

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Siebeck, 2017). Klein is now Professor of Systematic Theology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where this thematic interest remains on the agenda. See more recently, Rebekka A. Klein and Dominik Finkelde, In Need of a Master: Politics, Theology, and Radical Democracy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021). 3. See David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits,” in Timothy M. Costelloe, The Sublime From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118–31. 4. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) 5. This intuitive claim refers only to Caputo’s “theological’ work, but even a search in popular German academic journals, like Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, bear few results, and in almost all cases only oblique references to Caputo are made by German-speaking authors. 6. A translation of Caputo’s The Folly of God, however, is scheduled for publication in 2022. See John D. Caputo, Die Torheit Gottes: Eine radikale Theologie des Unbedingten, trans. Helena Rimmele and Herbert Rochitz (Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald, 2022). 7. See Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, “Background,” in Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 15–32. 8. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016). 9. Here again, the German translation of Dominique Janicaud’s famous text, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (1991), has appeared more than two decades later: see Dominique Janicaud, Die theologische Wende der französischen Phänomenologie, trans. Marco Gutjahr (Berlin, Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag, 2014). 10. And more recently reiterated by Ingolf Dalferth, Radical Theology: An Essay on Faith and Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016). 11. Eberhard Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth. Eine Paraphrase (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). 12. On the relationship between hermeneutical theology and post-metaphysical thought see, Hartmut von Sass, “Faith and Being: Hermeneutical Theology as PostMetaphysical Enterprise,” in Eric Hall and Hartmut von Sass (eds.), Groundless Gods: The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 214–41. 13. See Rudolf Bultmann’s Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 94–8, here 96. 14. Dalferth, Radical Theology, 175. Emphasis added. 15. Dalferth, Radical Theology, xiii. 16. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 17. See for example, Cláudio Carvalhaes’ contribution “Liberation Theology,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, 667–76.

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18. The reception of weak or radical theology in North American evangelical circles is an important case study and perhaps points to another reason for the limited traction of radical theology in the European tradition. To illustrate this, one should recall that in the broader context of the 1990s, American evangelicalism made an industry out of vilifying “postmodernism” and so-called “moral relativism,” for which “deconstruction” was the central term. However, as is often the case, evangelicals who were tired of denominationalism and “religion” began to reappropriate the term “deconstruction” for their own purposes (c.f. Brian McLaren, The Church on the Other Side, 1998). In this new post-evangelical context, the term came to mean a more “purified,” “essential,” and implicitly antisemitic Christianity. The fact that “radical theology,” and occasionally Caputo, gets associated with this ultimately colonizing abuse of deconstruction—the likes of which Derrida would not have recognized—even before his name is associated with radical theology (his Weakness of God was only published in 2006), is an unfortunate confusion. This goes some way in explaining why Caputo’s popular What Would Jesus Deconstruct (2007) addresses itself in part to an evangelical audience. 19. See the particularly well-known volume by John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff (eds.), St. Paul Among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 20. Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache Macht, 9. 21. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Joan Stambaugh (trans.) Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 41–74. 22. Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological,” 14–15. 23. Martin Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” in Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache Macht, 115–16. 24. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 119. 25. See Caputo’s, “Spectral Hermeneutics” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 81. 26. See Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 83. 27. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 122. 28. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 123–24. 29. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” 183 fn. 4. 30. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” 183 fn. 4. 31. Alexander Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild. Anarchie oder Pluralismus des Geistes?” in Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache Macht, 73. 32. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 76. 33. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 76. 34. For one example of this misrepresentation see Slavoj Žižek’s “Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox” in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, and Creston Davis (ed.), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 252–67, and Caputo’s response in John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 147–48. 35. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 77.

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36. Caputo, Weakness of God, 165. 37. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 78. Author’s translation. 38. For example, see Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 68–9. 39. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 40. See John D. Caputo, “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible” in Kevin Hart and Barbara E. Wall (eds.), The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 20–46. 41. Caputo, “The Experience of God,” 22. 42. Caputo, “The Experience of God,” 23. 43. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 69. 44. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 125. Author’s translation. 45. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 79–80. 46. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 81. 47. In an interview with Clayton Crockett, Caputo says, “my political theology stems from the prophetic streak that runs from the Jewish prophets to the New Testament and shows up in people like Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker Movement, the Berrigan brothers, the liberation theologians, and Bishop Oscar Romero.” See John D. Caputo with Clayton Crockett, “From Sacred Anarchy to Political Theology” in B. Keith Putt (ed.), The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 41. 48. Caputo himself admits as much, see Caputo and Crockett, “From Sacred Anarchy to Political Theology,” 38–42. I develop this connection in more detail in Calvin D. Ullrich, Sovereignty and Event: The Political in John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). 49. Johann Baptist Metz, “Suffering unto God,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994), 611–22. 50. I have explored this in greater depth in my own Sovereignty and Event, specifically chapter five. 51. See J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (eds.), Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012). Almost exactly the same criticism is directed at Caputo in David Newheiser’s recent Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology and the Future of Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 85–7. See my response, Calvin D. Ullrich, “A Caputian Reading of David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age,” Crossing: The INPR Journal 1 (2020), 198–206. 52. John D. Caputo, “On Not Settling for an Abridged Edition of Postmodernism: Radical Hermeneutics as Radical Theology,” in Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, 271–353. A shorter version of this long essay appears in John D. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 109–24. 53. Stephen Minister, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, 77. A similar concern is also expressed by Joeri Schrijvers, see Between Faith and Belief:

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Toward A Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life (New York: SUNY Press, 2016), 162. 54. John D. Caputo, “On Not Settling,” in In Search of Radical Theology, 118. 55. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 151–59. 56. See James Olthuis (ed.), Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo (London: Routledge, 2002). 57. See John D. Caputo, “Hoping in Hope, Hoping Against Hope,” in Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, ed. James H. Olthuis (London: Routledge, 2002), 129–30. 58. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 141–42. Emphasis added. 59. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 141–42. 60. Ullrich, Sovereignty and Event, 226–7, fn. 206. 61. John D. Caputo, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Unconditionality, The Coming God and Derrida’s Democracy to Come,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4, no. 3 (2003), 9–26. 62. Caputo, Weakness of God, 29. 63. Caputo, Weakness of God, 102–109. 64. Caputo, Insistence of God, 4. In thinking of a different irreducible “mode,” I am partial to Giorgio Agamben’s definition of a “modal ontology” (with reference to Spinoza), where a “Modal ontology, the ontology of the how, coincides with an ethics.” That is to say, it is not “what” we think, but “how” we think which is constitutive of our being. See Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 174, 231. 65. Caputo, Insistence of God, 8. 66. Caputo, Insistence of God, 31–8. 67. Caputo, Insistence of God, 20. 68. Caputo, Insistence of God, 14. 69. Caputo, Insistence of God, 87–116. 70. Caputo, Insistence of God, 177. 71. Caputo, Insistence of God, 94. 72. Caputo, Insistence of God, 151. 73. Caputo, Insistence of God, 43–7. 74. See Clayton Crockett’s, Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and the New Materialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 93–108. 75. Crockett, Derrida After the End of Writing, 1. 76. Within the theological turn there are signs that attention to the nonhuman aspects of our religious experience, the body, and its materiality are coming into view. For example, the work of Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney most obviously come to mind. See Kearney’s recent book on Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021) and with Brian Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and Falque’s triptych, especially, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (New York: Fordham University Press 2016). 77. Caputo, Insistence of God, 167–263; John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 183–240. 78. Caputo, Insistence of God, 170.

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79. The connection to affect theory would not be the first instance of bringing Caputo’s radical theology into a productive conversation. See Karen Bray, Grave Attending: A Political Theology of the Unredeemed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), where she attends to the feelings and moods of “unhappy” and “disabled” bodies to challenge the heteronormative demands of productivity under contemporary neoliberalism. 80. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 227–35. Caputo is affirmatively citing the “ontohermeneutics” of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 81. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 237. 82. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 65.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bray, Karen. Grave Attending: A Political Theology of the Unredeemed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Bultmann, Rudolf. History and Eschatology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957. Caputo, John D. Die Torheit Gottes: Eine radikale Theologie des Unbedingten. Translated by Helena Rimmele and Herbert Rochitz. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 2022. Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. “Spectral Hermeneutics.” In John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey Robbins, 47–85. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible.” In The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response, edited by Kevin Hart and Barbara E. Wall, 20–46. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

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Caputo, John D. “Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Unconditionality, The Coming God and Derrida’s Democracy to Come.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4:3 (2003), 9–26. Caputo, John D. “Hoping in Hope, Hoping Against Hope.” In Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, edited by James H. Olthuis, 120–149. London: Routledge, 2002. Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D., and Linda Martin Alcoff, Eds. St. Paul Among the Philosophers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Carvalhaes, Cláudio. “Liberation Theology.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, edited by Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller, 667–76. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Crockett, Clayton. Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and the New Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Crockett, Clayton, and Jeffrey Robbins. “Background.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, edited by Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller, 15–32. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Dalferth, Ingolf. Radical Theology: An Essay on Faith and Theology in the TwentyFirst Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 2005. Falque, Emmanuel. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. New York: Fordham University Press 2016. Heidegger, Martin. “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, 41–74. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Janicaud, Dominique. Die theologische Wende der französischen Phänomenologie. Translated by Marco Gutjahr. Berlin, Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag, 2014. Johnson, David B. “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and its Limits.” In The Sublime From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe, 118–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jüngel, Eberhard. Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth. Eine Paraphrase. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998. Kearney, Richard. Touch New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Kearney, Richard, and Brian Treanor, Eds. Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Klein, Rebekka. Depotenzierung der Souveränität. Religion und politische Ideologie bei Claude Lefort, Slavoj Žižek und Karl Barth. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Klein Rebekka A., and Dominik Finkelde. In Need of a Master: Politics, Theology, and Radical Democracy. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. Klein, Rebekka A., and Friederike Rass, Hrsg. Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017.

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Metz, Johann Baptist. “Suffering unto God.” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994), 611–22. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Newheiser, David. Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology and the Future of Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Rass, Friederike. Die Suche nach Wahrheit im Horizont fragmentarischer Existenzialität. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017. Schrijvers, Joeri. Between Faith and Belief: Toward A Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. New York: SUNY Press, 2016. Simmons, J. Aaron, and Stephen Minister, Eds. Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward A Religion With Religion. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Tracy, David. Fragments: The Existential Situation of our Time: Selected Essays, Volume I. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020. Tracy, David. “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of our Times.” In God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, 170–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Ullrich, Calvin D. Sovereignty and Event: The Political in John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. Ullrich, Calvin D. “A Caputian Reading of David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age.” Crossing: The INPR Journal 1 (2020), 198–206. Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Von Sass, Hartmut. “Faith and Being: Hermeneutical Theology as Post-Metaphysical Enterprise.” In Groundless Gods: The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought, edited by Eric Hall and Hartmut von Sass, 214–41. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. “Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox.” In The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, and Creston Davis, 234–307. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

Response to Ullrich John D. Caputo

I remember well the exchange about “fragments” that took place between Derrida and David Tracy at Villanova, which Calvin Ullrich recounts for us. I was delighted to see Tracy title the first of his two volumes of collected essays “Fragments”—just so long as it means frag-event, as Tracy says, and does not mean the break-up of a lost totality. I am delighted to sign on to its aphoristic energy which goes all the way back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I am very grateful for the historical contextualization supplied by Ullrich at the beginning of this piece. He is quite right to say I am a “latecomer” to radical theology. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, my turning point in this regard, was published when I was 57 years old. When Catherine Keller said I came out of the closet as a theologian in The Weakness of God I was 67 years old. Having started out as a young man as an identifiably “Catholic philosopher,” I tried thereafter to keep a safe distance from theology, official, institutionalized, denominational theology. I settled the lover’s quarrel that has gone in my heart between philosophy and theology all my life largely in favor of philosophy. When I took early retirement from Villanova to succeed my friend Charlie Winquist at Syracuse, which was the first time I ever taught a “religion” course, I was 64 years old. For a very long time, I did not trust theology and I did not want to teach under theological surveillance, dealing with “revealed” truths and “authorities.” Even my “conversion” to theology, my road to Damascus, was carried out under the impulse of Jacques Derrida, who, judged by the standards of the local pastor, rabbi, or imam, “rightly passes for an atheist.” So do I. But Derrida taught me that his atheism does not represent the end of “religion” (not quite “theology”) but the beginning of another religion, “without religion.” When I finally decided to use that word, under the prodding of Jeff Robbins, I searched frantically for a qualification, “theology” in scare quotes, “weak” theology, “theopoetics,” and then later, “radical” theology, something, 40

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anything, that would protect me from “theology” in any straightforward sense, “confessional” theology, the theologies of the existing historical communities of faith. I also wanted to separate myself from the “death of God” theologians who grabbed all the headlines when I was a graduate student. Prayers and Tears was very insistent that deconstruction is not the death of God. Once transplanted into theology, I needed a patron, so I turned to Tillich, one of the heroes of my youth, who I also noticed was starting to get a new hearing among younger theologians. So I like to quip that Tillich is my favorite official theologian and Derrida my favorite unofficial one. I find Ullrich’s account of the state of the debate about weak theology in Germany to be extremely informative and enlightening, and I think his response to my German critics is exactly right and based on a more comprehensive reading of my work. What follows should be regarded as supplement to Ullrich’s argument. First, I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not saying—that God exists but God is not omnipotent, that God is an existent but suffering deity. I am saying that God does not exist. Tout court. I do not know how to say it more clearly than that. I am saying that God “insists”—that the historically constructed name of God is the name of an event—and that the “existence” of God is up to us. The name of God is the name of a call to which we should be the response. The “weakness” of God does not mean that God exists, but God is weak. It means that this “call” is embodied in a name which does not name an agent-being that can do things but a call that calls without any other power or force to enforce it beyond its own appeal. It is what Derrida calls a “weak force” (force faible, a tertium quid, eine schwache Macht). When I speak of the messianic, I am following Derrida who is following Benjamin—not Vattimo—who says that we are messianic age, we are the ones the dead are waiting for to make right the wrongs that were done to them. When I speak of theopoetics I am not talking about the ornamentation of an already existing God, a theological aesthetics, I am saying that the name of God is the focus imaginarius of a theopoetic imagination, forged in and by this poetics. In Specters of God—which may interest Prof. Hailer, since it engages Schelling on God when God is not being God—I put it this way.1 To the question, “Does God exist?” the right religious and theological reply is, we do not know yet, not because, as an epistemological question, we have been unable to determine it, but because, as an ontological matter, it has not happened yet. It is not epistemological uncertainty but ontological indeterminacy. History is not over until it is over and it remains an open question whether history will make itself worthy of the name of God. The question of the existence of God is the question of what and whether God will have been. My friend Katharine Sarah Moody has promised to write a book on my work entitled What God Will Have Been. That is a brilliant title. That means that my post-theism is not “kenotic” but “pleromatic,” as I argued to Agata Bielik-Robinson. Unlike

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the metaphysically minded death of God squad, I am not saying that God has abdicated divine transcendence and emptied Godself into the world. I am saying that the name of God is a call, a promissory note, a still soft voice calling to be fulfilled in the world, to achieve embodiment, materialization, realization, Vollendung—so this movement is pleromatic. Theopoetics must in turn become theopraxis; we must make it happen. So theopraxis is human praxis, a point that is so clear that it misleads Chalamet into thinking I am making humankind omnipotent! As Ullrich points out, I have not elaborated an explicit political theology, and have directed my attention more to the essential impulses, the inspiring specters of ethical and political life. But, as he shows, the claim that its implications are conservative contentment with the status quo is misguided. Everything I say is meant to emphasize the “flux” (Radical Hermeneutics), the contingency and auto-deconstructibility of the status quo. Auto-deconstructibility under another name is fragmentation, or self-fragmentation. Ullrich rightly emphasizes that undeconstructibility—the famous example is “justice”—is not an ideal essence forever out of reach, not a Platonic eidos or a Kantian Idea. It is what I like to call a white light exposing every fault in the present order, creating a sense of urgency, not complacency. Autodeconstructibility describes the inner restlessness inscribed in the things themselves, which fall under the judgment of the undeconstructible. I am delighted that Ullrich has noticed that the one time I do criticize Derrida is to say that his own formulation of the messianic/concrete messianism distinction invites the misunderstanding that the messianic is a formalization, a universalization, of which the concrete messianism are instances, in other words, that it assumes a classical distinction between the essential and the factual. The truth is that the pure messianic is a historically datable and locatable Jewish trope, and so another messianism, the point being that the messianic is always the inner restlessness, the open-ended promise of the undeconstructible that inwardly disturbs each and every construction, more like a common plight than an ideal height, more like a ghost that haunts or a parasite that inhabits any given messianism. The messianic (or radical hermeneutic) situation is the space that opens up between “mourning,” the memory of suffering (Benjamin), on the one side, and the hope, the inner aspiration for the possibility of the impossibility, on the other side. This issues in what Derrida calls the aporetic postulate of urgency—aporetic because justice is always deferred and that means we will never be satisfied, and urgent because justice is always demanded here and now, and that means we will never rest. So the maxim that governs us is, as Derrida says, to go where you cannot go. Realize that this is impossible, then do it. Know that the gift will inevitably set off the chain of debt—then give. For with the impossible, anything is possible. If your horizon is limited to the possible, nothing much will happen. The best you can do, as Lyotard says, is

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to make a new move in an old game. It is only with the impossible that anything happens. By the impossible everything begins. Then you may invent a new game altogether. The impossible puts the present order at risk—for better or for worse, for it is true that the new order that is initiated might be a nightmare. All we know is that the present order is not to be tolerated. Why not? Because of the event, because of the auto-deconstructibility, the autofragmentability, which is constantly de-stabilizing it. It cannot be conserved even—and especially—by the conservatives. The best way to conserve a tradition is to deconstruct it, to keep it open to the future, which disloyalty to the tradition is the true loyalty to what is being transmitted, to die Sache selbst. I am particularly grateful to Ullrich for having read beyond The Weakness of God to my subsequent work, up to and including Cross and Cosmos, where I extend the theopoetic project to a cosmo-poetics, or cosmo-theo-poetics. As Ullrich shows, this work makes it clear I embrace a “new” or “non-reductive” materialism, that I prefer Hegel’s embodied historical Spirit to Kant’s pure reason, that I emphasize affectivity, taking religion as a deeply visceral-imaginative work (theopoetics), even a weak, fluid and hypothetical metaphysics. So then, do I believe in ghosts or in the real material world? I think that nowadays “matter” is something of an endangered species and that, as Derrida says, “the future belongs to ghosts.” The challenge to the “new species of theologians” I speak of is to analyze the fate of all flesh vis-à-vis the new AI technologies, the challenge posed to materialism not by the bible thumpers but by transhumanism and posthumanism, some of whom think we can “upload” consciousness and thereby shuffle off these mortal coils. Indeed, in his latest book, Reality+, David Chalmers explores just how seriously we should entertain the notion that we are all living in a virtual world.2 On these scenarios it is not God who is dead but good old-fashioned hard-rock billiard-ball Humean matter. “There is nothing outside the text”—that means, information goes all the way down! NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, Specters of God: Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022), 148. 2. David Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Specters of God: Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. Chalmers, David. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

Chapter 2

A Radical Fidelity John D. Caputo and the Future of Religion Marie Chabbert

One of the greatest merits and most important intellectual legacies of John D. Caputo lies, I argue, in his identification of deconstruction as a helpful response to a crucial challenge faced by any institution that wishes to survive the passage of time, namely, the necessity to keep the memory of the past and carry forth a heritage while continuously reasserting—by reinventing—its relevance for present times. As Derrida himself confirmed at the opening of the Villanova roundtable, in 1994, “That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.”1 The importance of such a “tension” strikes me with unprecedented force now that I have sworn into the Fellowship of the University of Cambridge’s St John’s College, an institution that seeks to combine a five-hundred-yearlong history with the modern values and innovative spirit without which it would hardly be more than a desiccated mummy ready to be put in a museum. How has such an old institution managed to remain a vibrant place of study, at the cutting edge of research, one that is as relevant today as it was in the sixteenth century? How does it select which traditions to maintain over time, which to abandon, which to revisit? To be sure, this process often takes longer than it should: for instance, the Fellowship only opened its doors to female academics forty years ago. This signals that the bargain between tradition and modernity, fidelity and innovation, is never complete. This was made clear to me at the time of my formal admission within the Fellowship: as a Fellow, it is my responsibility not only to loyally observe the Statutes and customs of the College but also to sustain and enhance the College’s ability to continue as one of the world’s top institutions for education and research. As such, my responsibility includes becoming a whistle-blower should the 45

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negotiation between tradition and modernity fail to keep up with the demands of our times. I am responsible for never letting the institution lose its grip with contemporary reality and become outdated. I believe that this new role and responsibility has sharpened my reading of deconstruction and allowed me to consider Caputo’s developments of Derrida’s thinking under a new light. In particular, I have a renewed appreciation for Caputo’s figure of the “radical hermeneut”—for whom, as Mark Dooley summarizes, “it is possible to love one’s tradition with all one’s heart, while at the same time subjecting it to penetrating critique and scrutiny”2—now that I have been invited to become what it would be appropriate to call a “radical Fellow” of the University of Cambridge’s St John’s College. This may seem surprising considering the fierce opposition to deconstruction demonstrated by members of this institution, among others, when Derrida’s name was put forward for an honorary doctorate, in 1992. However, I argue that this opposition largely stemmed from the reluctance of many philosophers to expose themselves and their work to the exercise of deconstructive doubt, a gesture of opening to the event which Derrida himself describes as an “ordeal.”3 Much as these philosophers still populate universities around the world, Cambridge Colleges are filled with Fellows who forget that their responsibility is as much toward innovation as toward tradition—or, more precisely, that fidelity to the latter demands an openness to the former. They fail to realize that caring for their institution implies ensuring its continued importance in the contemporary world, which demands, to use Derrida’s terms, “that [they] are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future.”4 According to Caputo, this teaching is also yet to be heard within religious institutions. In Roman Catholicism, the tradition within which both Caputo and I were raised, the hierarchy is such that the faithful rarely feel responsible for—or think they have any part to play in—what it is becoming as an institution. Being counted among the faithful largely depends on one’s willingness to obey. The threat of excommunication acts as a constant reminder that one should either unequivocally—understand, uncritically—embrace the Church, its doctrine and rituals, or leave it. In June 2021, the Catholic Bishops of the United States thus threatened Joe Biden with a “communion ban,” in hope that this would lead him to renounce his support of abortion rights. Religious obedience and its political manipulation are not, however, limited to traditions that admit a strong sense of hierarchy. Although Islam has never developed a clear hierarchical structure, hateful voices have recently arisen across the world to claim religious authority and foster a violent political agenda supposedly justified by an obscurantist reading of Islamic precepts. Even the historical suspicion of hierarchy characteristic of Protestantism did not prevent it from being increasingly associated, in the United States and elsewhere, with “a reactionary and destructive religious right,”5 with “Bible-thumpers,

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gay-bashing, and rural billboards and school boards denouncing the theory of evolution.”6 In his 2020 In Search of Radical Theology, Caputo does not mince words: abandoned to the rule of ultraconservatives who silence criticism “with authoritative doctrine, firm belief, solemn or enthusiastic rite,”7 religion shrinks “to a condition where it can flourish only among the least educated populace in an increasingly educated, globalized, and wired world.”8 Having grown up in France, I cannot but have Jean de La Fontaine’s fable of the oak and the reed at the back of my mind: religious institutions tend to act like oaks, inflexible in the face of the critical wind of change. One day, soon enough, this wind will uproot them, leaving only resilient, selfaware reeds standing. Perhaps Caputo, too, has this fable in mind when he asserts that “religion today is more in need of being saved than it is equipped to save anyone else.”9 This salvation, to be sure, would not imply granting it further solidity, saving it from criticism. As Caputo rightly remarks, confessional communities will not be able to assemble in good conscience so long as the faithful will be required “to check their intellectual faculties at the church door.”10 Saving religion today would rather imply opening it to critique and scrutiny—or as Caputo puts it, making it “suffe[r] from a wound that will not heal.”11 Such a wound was recently inflicted upon the Catholic Church through revelations of a widespread phenomenon of sexual abuse. In late 2021, the aptly named “Rapport Sauvé” released an estimate of 330,000 children abused by Church officials since the 1950s in France alone. Though this report is named after Jean-Marc Sauvé, head of the independent commission that conducted the investigation, I believe that it does come as an occasion for the Church to be saved (“sauvée”). The Church is given an opportunity not only to come clean and repent for its crimes but also and most importantly to finally act upon its systemic culture of abuse. The question remains whether Church officials will take up this opportunity, after decades of inertia. The Catholics of France themselves have grown tired of waiting for their institution to take action. Through open letters to religious authorities and the hashtag #AussiMonEglise, they are demanding that the Church—their Church—seize this opportunity to rethink its discourse on sexuality, its relationship to authority, and the place of women within the institution. This alone, French associations of believers claim, can restore public confidence and affirm the Church’s relevance for the twenty-first century. Caputo would certainly agree. At the opening of In Search of Radical Theology, he argues that if religion is to have a future, if it is to flourish outside isolated pockets of fearful ignorance, it must become a site of active critical engagement. It must welcome—and breed—radical hermeneuts who would care enough for their institution to challenge its inflexibility from within, attending to its inner fractures as so many openings to the future. In the last

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two decades, Caputo has become increasingly vocal in support of “the many local communities living on the borders of their confessional body, defying its authoritarianism, exposing its hypocrisy, hanging on by a thread before the letters of expulsion and excommunication arrive in the mail.”12 “They are my heroes,”13 he writes, defending their unorthodox approach even in theological circles. According to Caputo, indeed, far from representing a serious threat to religion, these communities’ critical gesture reflects the hermeneutical truth of theology, one that is too often repressed by confessional authorities. In what follows, I look at how Caputo’s approach to theology affects the way in which the faithful are counted and suggest that it inaugurates new perspectives for envisioning religious identity and peaceful coexistence today.

THE INTERRUPTION OF THEOLOGY “I cannot deny that what I am doing here is theological. Almost.”14 At the opening of his 2006 The Weakness of God, after decades of denegation and attempts at silencing his secret-not-so-secret desire for God, Caputo finally acknowledges the (quasi-)theological nature of his radical hermeneutics. Conceived of as a philosophical posture that implies sticking with irregularity and aporia whenever they are encountered, against the metaphysical temptation to make things look smooth and easy, radical hermeneutics highlights that there is no such thing as an unshakable ground, or as Caputo puts it, that “instability goes all the way down.”15 At first sight, this posture seems incompatible with that of theology, whose task is generally understood to be “to clarify the founding texts and oldest traditions [of a religion], to defend the community against its critics.”16 Irregularity, when found at the heart—or, as per Caputo’s use of the term “radical,” in the roots—of a religious doctrine, is but an embarrassment to confessional theologians. In The Weakness of God, however, Caputo argues that radical instability “is itself theological.”17 Taking my cue from Jean-Luc Nancy, who finds truth in the double value of genitives, I argue that Caputo here sheds light on the interruption of theology: he suggests that theology carries within itself what interrupts it, what disrupts its supposed unity and stability. This is visible, Caputo argues, “in the roots and in the rafters, in the prophets and the protesters, in the lost gospels and suppressed gospels, in the heretics and the mystics by which orthodoxy is continually disturbed.”18 As a discipline of doctrinal interpretation, theology is plurivocal. However, Caputo also remarks that there is an intrinsic instability to theology’s object of study, although it is supposed to be the highest being in the order of presence. He comes to this conclusion “aided by a patient reading of a certain Jewish Augustine.”19 Much as Augustine asked: “Who do I love

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when I love my God?” Derrida’s approach to the naming of God leads Caputo to realize and confess that “I do not know whether what I believe in is God or not.”20 In Sauf le nom, Derrida signals that the act of naming God is an intrinsically aporetic gesture. Insofar as it attempts to name the Supreme Being in excess of any finite name, the word “God” compromises the reality which it seeks to pin down, to identify, “as if it was necessary to lose the name in order to save what bears the name, or that toward which one goes through the name.”21 According to Derrida, the naming of God, which can be conceived of as a gesture of “self-protection of the unscathed, . . . protect[s] itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own.”22 It may, therefore, be described as “auto-immune”: it opens beyond the self-same. This means that one is condemned not to know what one is doing when naming God: one might be appealing to a proper referent, but one might also be gesturing toward a space beyond determinate reference. As Hent de Vries explains, when uttering God’s name, one always simultaneously engages in “an address and a certain suspension—an à Dieu and an adieu, a going toward God and a leave taking.”23 Derrida’s own experience of prayer may be set as an example. Having been raised a Jew, he tends to identify the prayer’s addressee with Judeo-Christian images of God “as a Father—a severe, just Father with a beard—and also, at the same time, images of a Mother . . . who is ready to forgive me.”24 However, he stresses that his prayers admit another layer. They are “the experience of a nonbeliever . . . who asks, ‘To whom am I praying? Whom am I addressing? Who is God?’.”25 A—surprising, perhaps—implication of Derrida’s deconstructive thinking for theological reflection, then, is that a faithful commitment to God implies a certain undecidability regarding His existence as proper referent. This has crucial consequences for debates surrounding the return of religious extremism at the forefront of international preoccupations. As Derrida observes in “Faith and Knowledge,” fundamentalist groups across the world seek to legitimize violence against rivals and unbelievers by appealing to the name of God.26 By shedding light on the fact that the word “God” is only ever an im-proper name, deconstruction signals that no doctrinal interpretation may be judged “pure” or is ever safe from criticism: “one can always criticize, reject or combat this or that form of sacredness or of belief, even of religious authority, in the name of the most originary possibility.”27 Building on Derrida’s observations, Caputo suggests that a theology that has come to understand itself as theo-logy must necessarily break with “the self-destructive effort of orthodoxy to be identical with itself, to be the selfsame all the way down.”28 That is the core argument behind his “weak” or “radical” theology, as developed in The Weakness of God and The Insistence

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of God and, more recently, in In Search of Radical Theology. Despite the best efforts of confessional authorities to establish themselves on firm ground by directing their prayers at a proper referent, a Master name that can “accumulate an army and institutional power, semantic prestige and cultural authority,”29 theology’s raison d’être as theo-logy is a God whose existence is haunted by “perhaps.” Being faithful to theology’s (un-)rooting, self-interruption, or constitution as “theology without theology,” thus requires cultivating a certain undecidability regarding God’s existence. Hence Caputo’s assertion that “theology has the disruptive force to awaken questioning and to stir thought . . . because the name of God is inscribed in theology.”30 Theology, as Caputo sees it, emerges as a hermeneutical discipline which implies questioning the established limits of one’s confessional body and becoming “a whistle-blower, an insider alerting everyone that there is trouble inside the corporation.”31 In contradistinction with accusations of quietism often addressed to deconstruction,32 then, it should be clear from Caputo’s reading that deconstruction calls theologians to action. It calls religious authorities overly preoccupied with otherworldly salvation to attend to the event that is astir, hic et nunc, in the act of naming God. It calls them to welcome—and embrace—opportunities for change, and thereby to open their institution to its own future. This explains why Caputo has been so tenacious in championing deconstruction in theological circles across the world. Exposure to deconstruction “releases theology from the grip of everything that makes theology ridiculous and dangerous and draws opprobrium down upon its head,”33 starting with its oak-like rigidity, through “a reduction of idolatry and blasphemy, of reification and objectification, of codification and institutionalization, of literalization.”34 By shedding light on the auto-immunity inherent to the act of naming God, deconstruction provides religion with the means to save itself, while opening new horizons of tolerance. This tolerance, to be sure, would stretch beyond this term’s Christian legacy: it would not be ascribable to a given religion but derive from the hermeneutical truth of any theo-logy.35 The autoimmunity inherent to the naming of God does guarantee the possibility of an infinite number of religions and doctrinal interpretations, for none of them can ever close in on itself or deny the others’ legitimacy. It signals, in other words, that theo-logy implies pluralism. THE LAST AND THE LEAST OF THE FAITHFUL This affects mainstream conceptions of religious identity. As Caputo highlights, following the example set by the “radical” theologian, it appears that “the most religious thing of all, the greatest passion of religion . . . requires

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a moment of atheism.”36 Being faithfully committed to a religion implies maintaining undecidability with regard to God’s existence. Hence Caputo’s admiration for those who establish themselves at the borders of confessional bodies: they are the last and the least [les derniers] of the faithful—the most unworthy of that name and yet thereby the ones who most deserve to be counted among the faithful. I borrow this phrasing from Derrida, who uses it to qualify his relationship with Judaism. As with his prayers, Derrida remarks that there are two layers to his “being Jewish,” layers which he derives from Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s distinction between “Judaism” understood as a determinate community united around a set of rituals and beliefs, and the indeterminable affirmation of openness to the other-to-come characteristic of “Jewishness.”37 Derrida argues that these layers testify to Jewish auto-immunity: Jewishness stretches beyond the limits of Judaism. Being Jewish thus appears to require some degree of unfaithfulness to Judaism, an openness to what lies beyond this community. “If I trust what remains for me indisputable or undeniable, to wit, an ‘I am Jewish,’” Derrida notes, “this experience of the irrevocable has always tolerated, even demanded, an infinite uncertainty regarding what might be meant by or involved in a ‘living together’ in a Jewish community— and first of all with oneself as Jewish.”38 For Derrida, circumcision is the cut that inaugurates one’s identity as a Jew while opening an incurable wound in this identity. It indicates that there is no proper Jew but the improper Jew, or as Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly put it, that commitment to a religion such as Judaism implies being “at the same time faithful and unfaithful, without . . . ever being able to assess the value of or the limits between faithfulness and unfaithfulness.”39 This explains why Derrida famously noted that he “quite rightly pass[es] for an atheist.”40 “He is, for all the world, by the usual mundane and confessional standards, an atheist.” Caputo stresses, based on the fact that Derrida did not wear the kippa nor circumcised his sons. “By the standards, say, of the local pastor, of the Pope or Jerry Falwell, of conservative mullahs and radical rabbis, he is an atheist, and also by the standards of his mother, too, who suspected it but was afraid to ask him for fear of what he would answer.”41 This does not mean, however, that he is one. Contrary to what may have transpired from the previous section, Derrida does not suggest that auto-immunity is proper to the naming of God. Rather, he locates it in the very act of naming. In Of Grammatology, building on Ferdinand de Saussure’s observation that there is no necessary unity between a name and its bearer, Derrida remarks that a signifier comes to make sense by relating to a signified through processes of figuration, classification, and phonic difference.42 The fact that the word “cat,” for instance, means different things in different languages implies that there is no natural reason why it should have anything to do with an

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actual cat. The word “cat” only acquires its meaning from the differences that exist between itself and other English words. One therefore always gestures beyond the reality that one seeks to name in the very act through which one attempts to pin it down. Every name, label, heading, and equivalent attempt at pinning down an identity comes with a spacing gesture, a différance. Following Derrida, then, religious and secular structures and ideologies must cultivate a certain undecidability, an openness to the other-to-come, in the very moment when they seek to close in on themselves under a heading. The deconstructive assertion that “I do not know whether what I believe in is God or not” translates into an “I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God”43 to be professed by theists and atheists, alike: “we none of us—neither believers nor nonbelievers, neither believers in this nor believers in that—know who we are.”44 Derrida’s mother should not have been afraid to ask her son whether he was an atheist, then. As Caputo highlights, “Derrida could never, nor indeed could anyone who has ever drunk deeply of his deconstructive well, be an atheist, no more than one can be a theist.”45 Much as Derrida’s faith is exposed to doubt, his atheism stretches beyond the selfsame; it demands an openness to what remains to-come (even, perhaps, to God), and therefore unfolds as an atheism “without atheism,”46 or as Derrida puts it, “a faithful one!”.47 Derrida is both the last and the least of the Jews and a “radical atheist”—though certainly not in Martin Hägglund’s sense.48 Derrida is “more than one”:49 more (atheist) than a theist, more (theist) than an atheist, always more than any one self-same identity. Theism and atheism themselves emerge as porous. At this point, one may remark that deconstruction’s blurring of the distinction between theism and atheism, belief and unbelief, the religious and the secular undoes secularism’s effort to protect spheres of human reality such as politics and scientific enquiry from the manipulative grip of religious ideologies, thus sparking fear of new waves of theocratic violence. I think that these reservations will be put to rest by the realization that, if secularism constitutes an effective obstacle to religious fundamentalism, it is not an ideal model for peaceful coexistence. It is now time to recognize that secularism is improvable, if only because it remains helpless in the face of violent secular ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism. Religious manipulation is not the sole threat to the freedom of consciousness. As thirteen French intellectuals, including Jean-Louis Bianco, Jean Baubérot, and Nicolas Cadène, have flagged in Le Monde in June 2021 in reaction to the instrumentalization and idealization of the laïcité principle as part of—largely Islamophobic— electoral strategies, pluralism “implies that political power is not based on any religious or ideological transcendence and that public authority cannot and should not impose any determinate regime of truth.”50 Dogmatism, ideological inflexibility, and the quest for self-identity are transcategorical.

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It is, therefore, only appropriate that a response to these issues be so too: our priority should not be to keep religion and politics separate, but rather to prevent any attempt at securing self-identity, whether it emerges within a confessional context or not. I argue that deconstruction is most helpful in this regard. By drawing attention to the auto-immunity inherent to the act of naming, it fosters a recognition that no label, heading, or name can adequately capture or pin down an identity, whether individual or collective, confessional or secular. Deconstruction thus provokes us to rethink our way of belonging not just to given confessional bodies but to any ideological party or identity group in terms of “a rupture with identitarian and totalizing belonging, assured of itself in a homogeneous whole.”51 On Derrida’s own admission, this deconstructive approach to belonging draws on his experience growing up a Jew in French Algeria. During the Second World War, he found himself caught up between, on the one hand, the racist gregariousness and anti-Semitic segregation of the French authorities, who expelled him from school in 1942, and the self-protective identitarian closure of the Jewish community, on the other. As a child, Derrida could “dream of a peaceful cultural, linguistic, and even national plural belonging only through the experience of nonbelonging.”52 Growing up, this experience developed into an intuition that peaceful coexistence depends on what Derrida describes as “auto-co-immunity,”53 that is, a belonging without belonging, or as Caputo puts it, the experience of a “we” that remains “highly qualified and unsure, always running scared, a certain ‘we who cannot say we,’ a ‘we, if such a thing exists.’”54 FLYPAPER ANXIETY Yet if “we” cannot say “we,” and if, as Derrida himself stresses, the only sense of identity that his thinking retains, if there is any, consists “in opening itself without being able any longer to gather itself,”55 a misalignment appears between Derridean deconstruction and Caputo’s radical approach to theology. Derrida challenges processes of identification to the point that the gathering gesture at the origin of any institution or identity group—including ecclesiae—seems no longer possible. If we follow Derrida’s deconstructive logic all the way down, there does not seem to be anything left to bring us together, nor to be faithful to, but the event, openness itself. Derrida’s thinking thus threatens to facilitate a systematic disengagement from structures of belonging rather than the fruitful critique that Caputo is looking to foster within institutions. If no one knows who one is, and whether one believes in God, why would anyone commit to keeping the memory of an institution’s past and carrying forth its heritage? Why would anyone care to bear the

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responsibility of opening an institution to the future, rather than leaving it to die? Although Derrida claims to be “more than one,” more (atheist) than a Jew but still a Jew, le dernier, he borders on being “less than one.” His “belonging without belonging” threatens to sound the death knell of identity groups, a death which would facilitate peaceful coexistence, yet only between atomized individuals who shy away from attachments, merely tolerating their neighbor, living next to one another rather than committing themselves to living together. Caputo has an acute perception of this risk and initiates a compelling critique of Derrida’s identitarian “fence-sitting,” as per his own terms.56 To be sure, Caputo clarifies that the deconstructive confession that “I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God” is not “altogether wrong,”57 but rather stands as “the most negative, the most apophatic, the most inhibited, the most parsimonious, the least passionate way to put the matter. It is . . . the least willing to say yes, to take a risk, to let ourselves be engaged by the momentum in things.”58 Derrida’s reserve may be traced back to what Paul Patton and John Protevi have—rightly, I think—diagnosed as “a sort of anxiety of influence on Derrida’s part, leading to the redoubtable caution and reflexive awareness of his writing.”59 Derrida admits walking on eggshells around established doctrines and concepts: “before all the[se] . . . , I have always had the reflex to flee, as if, upon first contact, indeed merely upon naming these concepts, I were going to find myself, like a fly, with my legs glued: captured, paralyzed, held hostage, trapped by a program.”60 His reaction to the events of May 1968 is telling in this regard. Whereas, as Patton and Protevi remark, “May ‘68 was a turning point in the lives of many who belonged to this post-war generation,”61 Derrida claims that: “I was not what is called a ‘soixante-huitard.’ Even though I participated at that time in demonstrations and organized the first general meeting at the time at the Ecole Normale, I was on my guard, even worried.”62 Given that revolutionary outbursts can descend into violence, I consider that Derrida’s reticence in the face of the events of May 1968 is praiseworthy. Besides, his reserve did not prevent him from taking part in the events or other forms of political action.63 However, when asked to name this action and clarify his ideological inclinations, Derrida remains evasive. As with religion, he steers clear from labels, like the fly steers clear of the paper roll full of honey. Yet I suspect that he thereby trades one paralysis for another: by refusing to get stuck in honey, he risks getting stuck in ascetic restraint, demonstrating what I can only describe as commitment issues or flypaper anxiety. To be sure, when it comes to religion, Derrida does eventually confess a determinate identity and willingly recognizes himself under a heading. Yet he does so through a transfer of responsibility. If Derrida feels confident enough to acknowledge that he “rightly passes for” an atheist, it is only because, he

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explains, “I am not saying this. Even when I say that they have good reasons for saying this, I am not saying this of myself. I am just referring to them, to what they say.”64 What Derrida proposes here is “not a regulative ideal but a compromise:”65 if neither theists nor atheists know who they are and whether they believe in God, others may still recognize attitudes that denote an attachment to a given religious tradition, to theism or to atheism. Despite the porosity of faith and doubt, one may still distinguish theists from atheists, the former being those who, “judged by public and conventional standards, believe in God.”66 This way of counting the faithful strikes me as problematic in many respects. In particular, I think that it does not sufficiently take into account the risk of misidentification. Though often innocent and easily disproved, misidentification grounded in prejudice can generate frustration and result in experiences of reject. Faced with the refusal of many social scientists to consider members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as “real Christians,” against the latter’s opinion, anthropologist Fenella Cannell thus questions the legitimacy of “others”—be they social scientists—in labeling individuals and communities as Christian or not, faithful or unfaithful, based on their own preconceptions of what being faithful looks like.67 According to Caputo, however, the issue with Derrida’s way of counting the faithful goes even deeper, for rightly-passing-for does not even clearly distinguish faithfulness from unfaithfulness. Derrida himself not only approves of those people who see him as an atheist but also of those who say exactly the opposite, recognizing in him attitudes that denote a certain theism.68 “So then what is the difference between quite rightly passing for one of the faithful and quite rightly passing for an atheist?” Caputo asks. “It is getting difficult to tell the difference.”69 If no one can say that one is Jew or Catholic, theist or atheist, do these identities still exist? By extension, is there any standard left against which the other can—rightfully so or not—compare and recognize the faithful? If Derrida is right to suggest that “the manner in which the faithful are counted must be changed,”70 his own thinking does not seem to allow for any difference to subsist between theism and atheism, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and therefore for any structure of belonging to survive an exposure to deconstruction. This explains why Caputo cannot come to consider Derrida as a radical theologian in his own right,71 though his deconstructive thinking provides theology with the means to understand itself as theo-logy by shedding light on its radical instability, as I have demonstrated in the first sections. During the Villanova Roundtable, after questions on philosophy, democracy, and justice, Caputo gets impatient and asks: “Can we talk a little bit about theology?” a question which Derrida answers thus: “We have started already, but we could continue,”72 demonstrating a clear disagreement on what counts as theology.

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Whereas for Derrida, any thinking faithful to the other-to-come, including deconstructive approaches to philosophy, democracy, and justice, qualifies as theo-logical, beyond any institutional anchorage, Caputo tends to restrict this term to hermeneutical efforts carried out within established structures of belonging. “Every time a confessional theologian is shown the door for showing confessional theology its limits,” Caputo notes, “we should add a pin on the map of radical theology and pin a medal on the theologian.”73 The subtlety of this comment lies, I contend, in the difference that it maintains between being shown the door and walking out. Radical theologians, as Caputo sees them, do not disengage from their institution. Their dissidence itself arises from what he identifies as deep care for—and passionate commitment to—their institution (and its radical instability). For Caputo, the radical theologian “is the other inside.”74 To be sure, Caputo recognizes with Derrida that the event astir in the act of naming “weakens both the transcendental claims of secular reason and the supernatural claims of confessional religion.”75 He therefore locates the hermeneutical truth of theo-logy within confessional and secular structures of belonging, going so far as to approach radical theology itself as “a two-edged sword, cutting through the self-enclosed systems erected by both the religious and secular orders.”76 For Caputo, however, the fact remains that radical theology emerges as a disturbance within such systems and orders. Radical theology, as Caputo sees it, cannot thrive in the absence—nor, indeed, on the grave—of structures of belonging.

THE QUESTION OF LOVE In rupture with Derrida’s commitment issues, then, Caputo suggests that there is a “better, more robust” way of attending to the event astir in the act of naming,77 one that would not risk fostering disengagement from structures of belonging but rather be compatible with one’s firm attachment to—even love for—an institution or identity group. This assertion may first seem problematic, if one considers that love is traditionally approached in terms of the union of two incomplete individuals who thereby reach completion. Thus understood, love does not seem to leave any space for the event, for the other-to-come. Whether what is loved is a person, a god, a doctrine, or an institution, absolutism in/as love justifies inflexibility, conservatism, and even violence against the infidel, which explains Derrida’s commitment issues. That is not, however, how Caputo conceives of love. For him, love tolerates no violence; it is neither a conquest nor even a way of winning. Rather, it arises in deep care and respect for the other as other: “to love the other,” Caputo writes, “means to go over to the other without passing the threshold

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of the other, without trespassing on the other’s threshold.”78 True love thus “keep the other safe.”79 It implies accepting that the other remains other, renouncing any pretense of totalization and appropriation, including through the workings of knowledge. In line with Augustine’s suggestion that love does not follow upon knowledge, Caputo suggests that love comes with a suspension of understanding regarding what or whom one loves. Love, as Caputo sees it, unfolds as “loving un-knowing” or ignorantia amans.80 This implies that “not to know . . . does not mean to drift despondently from day to day, in a cloud of unknowing and uncaring.”81 According to Caputo, ­undecidability does not necessarily imply disengagement nor translate into a passive form of tolerance, for it also arises in love itself. Passionate commitment to an identity group, deep care for an institution, and love for an other all imply maintaining a certain undecidability with regard to the identity of the object of one’s love. True love emerges as a question that can never be answered, an open question mark. It unfolds as a passion for the impossible, for the unassimilable otherness of the other. I contend that Caputo’s critical supplementing of Derrida’s thinking here meets Nancy’s. If Derridean deconstruction may not be sufficient to foster a culture of critique and scrutiny within existing institutions, indeed, it must not be forgotten that deconstruction itself is “more than one.” Besides, unlike Derrida’s, Nancy’s deconstructive thinking is not affected by flypaper anxiety. Derrida himself has confessed his admiration for Nancy’s courage in tackling concepts such as community and being while steering clear of the totalization characteristic of metaphysics.82 Such a reworking relies on Nancy’s ontology of “being singular plural.”83 For Nancy, being should be recognized as “a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions . . . , whose unity remains a question to itself.”84 Being is never proper; it is “a permanent regime of intrusion” that cannot close itself up in a self-same identity.85 That does not mean, however, that one cannot recognize oneself in a proper name or willingly gather in a given structure of belonging, under a determinate heading. Unlike Derrida, Nancy welcomes identity as that which indicates “a property of being,” on the condition that “I do not forget that ‘I is another’ and this other is also in being.”86 That is true of both individual and collective identity: for Nancy, “any ‘being oneself’ (of a person, of a ­country, of a language, of a thought) implies a host of intrusions.”87 Institutions and identity groups consist of the coming together of beings whose singular ­plurality always already challenges what is wrongly perceived as the unity of their edifice. Every structure emerges as ‘a jumble or an “agglomeration’ . . . in which things go in all directions.”88 The sense of identity and belonging that Nancy fosters, then, depends on the recognition that something always withdraws from totalization, an ontological withdrawal which must not only be welcomed but facilitated, against any temptation of closure.

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Crucially for my purpose, Nancy remarks that such a recognition arises in demonstrations of love. Far from arising in communion, love—as Nancy sees it—depends on the inassimilable singularity of the parties involved for what is loved in the other is not their good look or qualities, but “the fact that the other is,”89 which is why love is so difficult—if not impossible—to justify and rationalize. For Nancy, then, to love truly is to “love what escapes you.”90 It is an expression of trust or faith in what remains unavailable in the other, as testified by the exchange of marital vows and the engagement—les fiançailles in French, which shares the same etymological origin as faith. Like Caputo, Nancy therefore prompts us to recognize that love comes with a certain suspension, a withdrawal from assimilation and totalization. In love, according to Nancy, “the other does not become me . . . , but the two are inseparable, they cannot do without each other, without for that matter becoming one, by being precisely two.”91 It is in this love, whose object remains inassimilable, that Caputo locates radical theology. “When something unforeseeable and unknowable, unpossessable and impossible drives us mad, when the tout autre becomes the goal without goal, the object without object, of a dream and a desire that renounces its own momentum of appropriation, when the impossible is the object of our love and passion,” he asks, “is that not what we mean by ‘my God’? Is that not the name of God?”92 Building on Augustine’s suggestion that, “whenever we love anything, however base or noble, we love God, even if we do not know that it is God whom we love,”93 Caputo argues that loving something or someone truly—that is to say, in a way that recognizes that the object of one’s love stands beyond appropriation—means demonstrating the same openness to the event as the radical theologian committed to the theo in theo-logy. I contend that Caputo thus proposes a more affirmative way of counting the faithful than that proposed by Derrida. Beyond labels and formal affiliation, the faithful appear to be those whose love for a deity, an institution, or a doctrine, whether confessional or secular, comes with a recognition that they do not—nor can ever—know what this deity, institution, or doctrine is. They do not simply state: “I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God,” surrendering the gesture of identification to the other, but rather, in a more committed Augustinian fashion: “I do not know what I love when I love my God.”94 While demonstrating a firm attachment to the object of their love, the faithful give it room to breathe, to change—to become, as Deleuze would put it. Their love comes as an acknowledgment and active cultivation of their loved one’s openness to the event. It awakens questioning from within, in rupture with both uncritical obedience and disengaged openness. If Caputo’s own questioning of the doctrinal limits of Christianity in search of radical theology may be set as an example, I believe that so too does Nancy’s relationship with Catholicism. Though he received a Jesuit

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education and was once an active member of the Young Christian Students (YCS), Nancy’s relationship with the Catholic Church hit a wall in 1956, when the YCS was condemned by the bishops of France for its support of the decolonization of Algeria. “It was an earthquake for all the activists.” He recalls. “The question then became whether to stay or leave.”95 I suspect that he chose neither option to interrogate, instead, “how and to what degree . . . we care about Christianity.”96 While henceforth refusing to declare himself a Catholic, indeed, Nancy never stopped caring for this religious tradition. This transpires from his suggestion—in terms that could, I think, be those of Caputo’s ideal radical theologian—that “beyond any institutional requirement, perhaps even beyond belonging to the Church, there remains something in which one should persevere,”97 a deeper truth than Christianity found within the latter, namely, a gesture of opening beyond the self-same, the ontological truth of being’s singular plurality and withdrawal from totalization. Throughout his career, and more specifically in the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy has strived to shed light on the interruption—or deconstruction—of Christianity in both senses of the genitive, that is to say, on the fact that Christianity carries within itself what interrupts its supposed unity and stability. He appeals not only to the fact that Christianity is the religion of the death of God but also to the Trinitarian nature of the Christian divine, which prevents God from being viewed as a sufficient subject or an all-absorbing totality. The doctrine of incarnation itself has been read as a kenotic retreat of God from Himself. According to Nancy, Christianity withdraws the ground from under God’s feet, thereby paving the way for its own deconstruction and opening beyond the self-same. I argue that Nancy thus attends to the theo in theo-logy, proving faithful to openness itself, in line with Derrida’s deconstructive thinking. However, unlike Derrida, Nancy does not risk fostering a dissolution of structures of belonging: his attention to Christianity’s inner instability testifies to his firm attachment to this religious tradition. Beyond any formal affiliation to the Church, Nancy proves faithful to Christianity by facilitating its opening to the future. It is, perhaps, this radical fidelity that “we,” the singular-plural beings who come together in our shared-but-not-common love for Catholicism, should demonstrate today in the face of revelations of sexual abuse and a general attitude of conservative inertia that bring shame upon us all. Beyond the unique solution of disengagement, Caputo and Nancy highlight that an attachment to tradition and passion for God Himself imply facilitating religion’s opening to the future. If we are not responsible for the Church’s past, we are responsible to open the institution to the future. To do so, Caputo argues, we must dare to love it truly, that is to say, in a way that acknowledges, cherishes, and even cultivates the fact that there is—and will always

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be—trouble inside the institution. This alone can affirm religion’s relevance for the twenty-first century, by approaching it as a site of active critical engagement. I argue that Caputo thus proves more faithful to Derrida’s assertion that deconstruction is but a bargain between tradition and modernity, fidelity and innovation, than Derrida himself. Caputo’s deconstructive thinking combines love for tradition and openness to modernity, these being revealed as intermingled, even indissociable. Crucially, I contend that it thereby inaugurates new perspectives for thinking peaceful coexistence today. By calling us to attend, through love, to the event at work within structures of belonging, Caputo fosters a recognition that no institution nor doctrinal interpretation may be judged “pure” and safe from criticism. He thereby facilitates an active, caring form of “living together,” one in which love for one’s tradition comes with a passion for the impossible, an openness to the other—one’s neighbor—and a deep respect for his or her tradition. Caputo’s deconstructive love unfolds as love for pluralism, love as pluralism, beyond mere tolerance. NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida,” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 6. 2. Mark Dooley, “Saints and Postmodernism: Introduction,” in A Passion for the Impossible, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), xviii. 3. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 5. 4. Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 5–6. 5. John D. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 24. 6. Caputo, Radical Theology, 23. 7. Caputo, Radical Theology, 7. 8. Caputo, Radical Theology, 26. 9. Caputo, Radical Theology, 24. 10. Caputo, Radical Theology, 26. 11. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287. 12. Caputo, Radical Theology, 7. 13. Caputo, Radical Theology, 7. 14. Caputo, Weakness, 1. 15. Caputo, Radical Theology, 4. 16. Caputo, Radical Theology, 4. 17. Caputo, Radical Theology, 4. 18. Caputo, Radical Theology, 25.

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19. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 331. 20. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 331. Emphases in quotes are in the original sources, except where indicated otherwise. 21. Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 58. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 80. 23. Hent de Vries, “A-dieu, adieu, a-Dieu,” in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed. Adriaan Peperzak (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 217. 24. Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith” interview by John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 30. 25. Derrida, “Epoché and Faith,” 30. 26. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 46. 27. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 93. 28. Caputo, Radical Theology, 25. 29. Caputo, Weakness, 8. This effort of determination may be conducted either positively or by negation, through what Derrida describes as an “ontological wager of hyper-essentiality.” See Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 78. 30. Caputo, Weakness, 289. 31. Caputo, Radical Theology, 3. 32. See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) and Alain Badiou, “L’Offrande réservée,” in Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin (Paris: Galilée, 2004). 33. Caputo, Radical Theology, 16. 34. Caputo, Radical Theology, 16. 35. At this stage, one can wonder about how this affects—and/or mobilizes—nonmonotheistic religions, including non-transcendent forms of spirituality. If tolerance, as Derrida and Caputo see it, does stretch beyond its Christian legacy, it appears to still be largely limited to Abrahamic traditions. 36. John D. Caputo, “God and Anonymity: Prolegomena to an Ankhoral Religion,” in A Passion for the Impossible, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 17–18. 37. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 89–90. 38. Jacques Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 22.

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39. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, “A Monster of Faithfulness,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 158. 40. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155. 41. John D. Caputo, “A Game of Jacks: A Response to Derrida,” in A Passion for the Impossible, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 43. 42. See Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 89. 43. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 331. 44. Caputo, Weakness, 283. 45. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 43. 46. John D. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 109. 47. Jacques Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” interview by Mark Dooley, in A Passion for the Impossible, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 28. 48. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 49. Derrida, “Becoming Possible,” 32. 50. Olivier Abel et al., “Pourquoi nous créons la Vigie de la laïcité, un organisme indépendant et citoyen,” Le Monde (9 juin 2021). I translate and emphasize. 51. Derrida, “Avowing,” 28. 52. Derrida, “Avowing,” 27. 53. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87. 54. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 108. 55. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 75. 56. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 44. 57. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 331. 58. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 331. 59. Paul Patton and John Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 7. 60. Jacques Derrida, “Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come,” in For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 59. 61. Patton and Protevi, Between Deleuze and Derrida, 6. 62. Jacques Derrida, Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 347. 63. Besides May 1968, one thinks of the Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement en Philosophie, the Collège International de Philosophie, the International Parliament

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of Writers, the creation of “cities of refuge,” the support of Czech dissidents, his interventions around migration, etc. 64. Derrida, “Becoming Possible,” 32. 65. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 36. 66. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 46. 67. Fenella Cannell, “The Christianity of Anthropology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11, no. 2 (2005): 352. 68. Derrida, “Becoming Possible,” 32. 69. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 44. 70. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 90. 71. See Caputo, Radical Theology, 204–205. 72. Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 19. 73. Caputo, Radical Theology, 25. 74. Caputo, Radical Theology, 25. 75. Caputo, Radical Theology, 18. 76. Caputo, Radical Theology, 26. 77. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 331. 78. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 49. 79. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 49. 80. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 39. 81. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 332. 82. See Derrida, “Responsibility,” 58. 83. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 84. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 155. 85. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2017), 40. I translate. 86. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness, trans. François Raffoul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 21–22. 87. Nancy, L’Intrus, 61. I translate. 88. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Autour de Dans quels mondes vivons-nous ?”, interview by Florian Forestier, in Actu Philosophia (22 April 2012). http://www​.actu​-philosophia​ .com​/entretien​-avec​-jean​-luc​-nancy​-1​-autour​-de​-dans/. I translate. 89. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dieu, La Justice, L’Amour, La Beauté. Quatre petites conférences (Montrouge: Bayard, 2009), 104. I translate. 90. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 37. 91. Nancy, Dieu, Justice, Amour, Beauté, 99. I translate. 92. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 332. 93. Caputo, “Game of Jacks,” 38. 94. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 332. 95. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Possibility of a World: Conversations with PierrePhilippe Jandin, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 10.

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96. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion. Déconstruction du christianisme, I (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 203. The translation is mine, as I find the existing English translation by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith rather inadequate—see Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 139. In this instance, the French “tenir à” should not, I argue, be translated by the English “to hold to” but rather by “to care about.” 97. Nancy, Possibility of a World, 12. Translation slightly altered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Olivier, Radia Bakkouch, Jean Baubérot, Jean-Louis Bianco, Dounia Bouzar, Nicolas Cadène, Nilüfer Göle, Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez, Daniel Maximin, Philippe Portier, et al. “Pourquoi nous créons la Vigie de la laïcité, un organisme indépendant et citoyen.” Le Monde (9 juin 2021). https://www​.lemonde​.fr​/idees​/ article​/2021​/06​/09​/pourquoi​-nous​-creons​-la​-vigie​-de​-la​-laicite​-un​-organisme​-independant​-et​-citoyen​_6083436​_3232​.html. Badiou, Alain. “L’Offrande réservée.” In Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, edited by Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin, 13–24. Paris: Galilée, 2004. Cannell, Fenella. “The Christianity of Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 2 (2005): 335–356. Caputo, John D, ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. “A Game of Jacks: A Response to Derrida.” In A Passion for the Impossible, edited by Mark Dooley, 34–49. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Caputo, John D. “God and Anonymity: Prolegomena to an Ankhoral Religion.” In A Passion for the Impossible, edited by Mark Dooley, 1–19. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 32–125. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Cohen, Joseph, and Raphael Zagury-Orly. “A Monster of Faithfulness.” In Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, 155–174. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation.” Translated by Gil Anidjar, in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, edited by Elisabeth Weber, 18–41. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible.” Interview by Mark Dooley, in A Passion for the Impossible, edited by Mark Dooley, 21–33. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “Circumfession.” In Jacques Derrida, translated and edited by Geoffrey Bennington, 3–315. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “Epoché and Faith.” Interview by John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood, in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, 27–52. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Translated by Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 40–101. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Translated by Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, 73–142. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Today’s Europe. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994. Translated by Peggy Kamuf and others, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come.” In For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, translated and edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, 56–86. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Derrida, Jacques. Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum). Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., in On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, 35–85. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.” In Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, edited by John D. Caputo, 3–28. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. de Vries, Hent. “A-dieu, adieu, a-Dieu.” In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, 211–221. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Dooley, Mark. “Saints and Postmodernism: Introduction.” In A Passion for the Impossible, edited by Mark Dooley, xi–xxiii. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. “Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism.” In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:

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Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick Lawrence, 161–184. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Autour de Dans quels mondes vivons-nous ?” Interview by Florian Forestier, Actu Philosophia (22 April 2012). http://www​.actu​-philosophia​.com​/ entretien​-avec​-jean​-luc​-nancy​-1​-autour​-de​-dans/. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular-Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Déclosion. Déconstruction du christianisme, I. Paris: Galilée, 2005. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dieu, La Justice, L’Amour, La Beauté. Quatre petites conférences. Montrouge: Bayard, 2009. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Intrus. Paris: Galilée, 2017. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. Translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Patton, Paul, and John Protevi, eds. Between Deleuze and Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Response to Chabbert John D. Caputo

If anyone wants to compose a new dictionary of deconstruction, my advice to them is to include an entry on “flypaper anxiety.” I am very grateful to Marie Chabbert’s beautiful contribution to this volume and for this magnificent construction which I think deconstruction must now make its own. Her chapter reminds me of a conference I attended many years ago conducted by a Catholic faculty at Dutch university, where one of the professors, a Catholic priest, invited a few of us to his home for dinner. We were greeted at the door by a woman whom we soon learned was his partner. They lived together and were obviously in love. Later on that evening, after I had consumed enough wine, I asked our host, Why do you not resign from the priesthood and get married? “Because it is not their church,” he said. That was rhetorically and theologically a perfect and unforgettable reply. It’s my church, too, hashtag #AussiMonEglise. Beyond in-your-face “canonical disobedience” this is good theology, the theology of Vatican II, Yves Congar and the priesthood of the laity, “the church” as the people of God, populus dei, not Vatican secretaries sitting behind big desks. Ubi spiritus est, ibi ecclesia. As Chabbert argues, this is to create a disturbance from within which is not an enemy within but the hermeneutical truth within, like a voice calling the church back to itself. Such disloyalty is the only way to be loyal to a tradition. When Derrida quipped at Villanova that he is a “very conservative person,” we all laughed,1 but he meant deconstruction is the best way to conserve a tradition. That is what I call the “Catholic Principle,” the principle of traditio, of the continuing transmission of the memory and the promise of Jesus, in an ongoing auto-deconstructive process. The Spirit is prompting not from above, top down, from heaven on high, or in Latin promulgations from the Vatican, but from below, bottom up, from within, from among the “least and the last,” les derniers, ta me onta. The Spirit whispers unsettling thoughts 67

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in ecclesiastical ears about women, married priests, LBGTQ Catholics, immigrants, social justice, care for the planet, and when the powers that be refuse to listen, they are refusing the promptings of the Spirit. So Chabbert has singled out something important about my work which is both biographical and philosophical. I grew up in a world steeped in Pius XII Council of Trent pre-Vatican II Catholicism, spent four years in a Catholic religious order, taught in a Catholic university most of my life, was elected President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. By the time I was forty years old I had extricated myself from the dogmatics of Catholicism, and for a number of years I considered myself a (pure) philosopher and tried—without success—to get religion out of my head. Eventually, it would turn out, my work as a philosopher would lead me back to religion and theology and would come to a head in what I called weak or radical theology, which I concluded is the hermeneutical truth of the world in which I grew up. Herkunft and Zukunft coincide. I will always be making a point of Catholic, Christian, biblical, Abrahamic provenance and pedigree. I will always be speaking Jewgreek. That brings me to the philosophical point Chabbert has singled out. Neither Derrida nor Chabbert nor I can “deconstruct” something. Derrida’s point is that we so-called deconstructors are like journalists who have arrived at the scene of an event and are reporting back what is happening there. A tradition, any tradition, is auto-deconstructive, that is, an unstable unity, a self-displacing self-assembling historical process of reinvention, astir with multiple and conflicting voices, whose truth, like a living language, is still in the making, as any close reading of that tradition will reveal. The best way to “deconstruct” something is to write a meticulous history of it. So if you ask me, Where can we find these “radical theologians”? The answer is, they are hidden in plain sight in the confessional bodies, where they are the ones getting in trouble with the people who (too often) have the power but do not have the Spirit! Philosophically, this is the principle of the inside/ outside, as when Derrida says that the deconstruction of the university takes place in people who have first proven themselves according to the protocols of the university. As Edward Baring has shown, Derrida got the idea for deconstruction when he was training students at the École Normale to both lose themselves in the history of dead philosophers and to find themselves as creative living thinkers.2 The productive “exorbitant” reading is prepared for by the most meticulous reproductive reading that retraces the original orbit. First we must associate ourselves with something intimately in order to dissociate and reinvent. It is in this context that Chabbert cites Derrida’s anxiety about established concepts—institutions, movements, traditions—fearful of becoming a fly with his legs glued to flypaper, detectable as early as the distance he observed

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from the French Communist Party. It also shows up when he recites and rephrases “O my friends, there are no friends,” in terms of “democracy.” In the expression, the democracy to-come the to-come is more important than the democracy. But then Chabbert puts me in a difficult position, asking me to endorse my distance from Derrida, which I never really wanted to create. I would have said that this is what he would have said. But Chabbert says his flypaper anxiety is a stickier situation than I have allowed. Then I will say that this is what he should have said. I grew up in an extremely, excessively consolidated and self-identical Catholicism, whose glue is still sticking to me, so maybe this biographical difference makes for a difference between the two Jacks. Maybe I am following Derrida where he would not march himself. I introduce only one qualification on this wonderful analysis for which I am extremely grateful. As I argued in Prayers and Tears, the discussion of Derrida’s relationship to religion and negative theology (of a Christian Neoplatonic type) had been blocked by not paying enough attention to the “Jewishness” beyond Judaism of Derrida precisely as one of les derniers, and hence of deconstruction, to the tropes, to the climate of his thinking, which are recognizably, identifiably Jewish, at least in Yerushalmi’s sense. But I do concede Chabbert and Protevi may have discovered a difference between Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, which is “more than one,” and maybe this shows up in les Catholiques, meaning this time, Jacques’s Catholic friends. I am happy and honored to be associated with Nancy on this point. For deconstruction, s’il y en a, as I understand it, is a matter of strategically situating oneself on the inside/outside, on the “margins” (Derrida) or “borders” (Tillich) of an auto-deconstructive process. A deconstruction does not, in the manner of the Enlightenment, keep a critical distance from something in order to get its leverage; it does not critique or deny or attack or “hammer” something from without (everything that is wrong with Hägglund’s atheism). A deconstruction—which Derrida says is love—does not deny but hyperaffirms, affirming to the point of excess, not pushing but allowing something to cascade, to overflow, to exceed itself, in short, releasing the event it harbors, like the event that is contained in the name of God. In “Circumfession,” Derrida does not attack Augustine’s dualism. He kneels down (or bows down) beside him and prays with his “compatriot,” praying all the harder, producing a still more “wounded” (circumcut) word (Chrétien), praying a hybrid, slightly atheistic quasi-Jewish Augustinian prayer. That, I think, is deconstruction in actu exercitu, glowing white hot. Radical theology, radical hermeneutics, is always the radicalization of something, of polymorphic traditions, the historical beliefs and practices, we (who cannot say “we” without fear and trembling) have inherited. So it is a theory of inheritance and, as such, more of a how—how to affirm something without allowing that affirmation, that faith (foi), to contract

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into a “position,” a belief (croyance)—than it is a what, a set of beliefs. This should take the air, not out of identities, but out of our identity wars, undoing the self-identity of both religion and of laïcité (of supernaturalism and transcendental rationalism). Let there be as many identities, genders, languages, and cultures as possible, “so long as all of them are true” (= open-ended), as Augustine said of interpreting the scriptures. These identities, these concrete, historical beliefs and practices will always exist. They are the only thing that exists. Events insist. Die Seienden sind, aber das Sein “west.” For the mark of what-is-being-radicalized remains written all over the radicalization, still visible under the erasure, and can be identified by a retrospective analysis, which is also why there are, there should be, as many radical theologies as there are theological traditions. The Weakness of God is transparently, unapologetically, an attempted radicalization of Christianity. It is still possible to identify the two sides of the Rubicon, but events happen on both sides (even if I have my doubts about the future of “religion” in the strict or narrow sense). We begin where we are, in the middle of a “text”—a tradition, a community, a body of beliefs and practices—and start probing like a blind man with a stick, feeling about for the event. Where else could we begin? We did not drop from the sky, we cannot lose the accent we grew up with, and we are all siblings of the same circumstance. The way Tillich put it was to say religious traditions trade in symbols but (1) symbols are not arbitrary contrivances; they grow out of the depths of human experience (the “ground of being”). Schelling, his muse, was one of the founding geniuses of mythology, the study of roots of myth in the depth of being. So to displace beliefs is not to trivialize them. (2) We must never confuse the symbol with what it is a symbol of, which is the “unconditional.” This he called the Protestant Principle. This is not far from the Jewish Principle, the critique of idols, which resonates throughout deconstruction. To this Derrida added a hauntological caution: remember, the unconditional comes without sovereignty, without the wherewithal to lay down its head, not as the ground of being but as may-being, not as être but as a dangerous peut-être, not quite a Geist but a ghost, a still small voice, a souffleur, calling not from above but from within, from the interstices and fissures, the cracks and crevices, from the disjointed and the dissenters, the whistle-blowers and trouble-makers, from ta me onta, les derniers.

NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo, with a new Introduction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 8.

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2. Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy: 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baring, Edward. The Young Derrida and French Philosophy: 1945–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, edited by John D. Caputo, with a new Introduction, New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

Chapter 3

Is It Radical Enough? The Ethical Call of Caputo’s Theopoetics to Stick to the Difficulty of Life in Light of Black Lives Matter Enrieke Damen

SETTING THE STAGE: AN INTRODUCTION TO BLACK LIVES MATTER AS A MOVEMENT OF PROTEST In 2012 the world of social media got wind of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter for the very first time. This hashtag was created in response to the injustice that three social justice activists and black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, felt when they heard the judgment of a Florida jury.1 George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch, was acquitted of all charges in the fatal shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young black boy. Not long after, Garza posted what is by now her famous Love Letter to Black People on Facebook in which she stated: We don’t deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where Black lives matter. Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter.2

Cullors reposted Garza’s Love Letter to Black People with the hashtag BlackLivesMatter. “Many of us were tired and disturbed by the lack of recognition toward the killings of black people by vigilantes and law enforcement,” Cullors recalls. “We were tired of it not leading the news. We were tired of it not being a part of the conversation around racial justice. We were like, ‘What are we going to do next? What’s the strategy’?”3 What started as a small and local protest by three activists in California would two years later all of a sudden develop into the nationwide protest 73

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movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) that addresses the police violence against black people. The death of yet another unarmed young black man was the reason for this surge of attention. On the 17th of July 2014, Eric Garner suffocated from a choke hold by a New York Police Department officer. A video on social media revealed that Garner said, again and again, “I can’t breathe,” while he was held down. Then, on the 9th of August of that same year an eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead during a clash with a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. In the predominantly black community of Ferguson, the death of Michael Brown caused a sense of outrage and large-scale protest against the largely white police department. This sense of outrage over Brown’s death was compounded by the fact that police investigators left Brown’s body lying in the street in a puddle of blood for several hours. Images of the scene went viral on social media. Social media had become the thriving force behind the protests that arose in response to the death of these young men and caused the BLM movement to take shape. It became a platform where people could connect and share their stories. In seeing all these individual stories next to one another, more and more people started to realize that these were not individual “incidents,” there were simply too many. All these incidents are “part of a pattern of police brutality, violence, and lack of accountability that grew out of systemic racism.”4 #BlackLivesMatter had become more than a hashtag, it gave words to the experience of black people in the face of systemic injustice, and it had become a nationwide activist movement that raised its voice in protest. In doing so, the BLM movement created a growing awareness of the long history of systemic racism and injustice in the United States.5 On a small scale the BLM movement gained traction outside the United States, but it was not until after the death of yet another innocent black man, George Floyd in Minneapolis, that its protests resonated in contexts all over the world. A video of Floyd’s death, which also went viral on social media, showed that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck while he was lying face-down on the street. Floyd’s words to officer Chauvin, “I can’t breathe,” became the anthem to the outrage and resistance that people all over the world felt. As Madeleine kennedy-macfoy and Dubravka Zarkov state, “it soon became clear, however, that protesters outside of the United States were not taking to the streets merely in an act of solidarity. Many—especially in Europe—took to the streets to protest police violence against Black and Brown bodies and against institutional racism in their own countries.”6 The enormous scale of these BLM protests in the European context—the context from which I speak—with protests in cities as, for example, Paris, London, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Zagreb, and Amsterdam, suggest that systematic racial violence and inequality have an equally problematic presence in European societies.

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As Jean Beaman convincingly describes, the broader social movement of BLM in Europe builds on “past and present anti-racist mobilizations across Europe.”7 She distills four key issues for BLM in the particular context of Europe: “challenging the denial of race and racism, fighting police violence, forcing Europe to grapple with its history of slavery and colonialism through decolonizing efforts, and asserting and affirming blackness across Europe.”8 Ultimately, she states, BLM in Europe “challenges a European exceptionalism with regards to race and racism, and challenges Black Europeans’ frequent designation as permanent outsiders within Europe.”9 In other words, BLM as a movement of protest calls upon on Europe and Europeans for awareness, to “stay woke,” concerning (institutional) racism and its problematic past of slavery and colonial power. CAPUTO’S THEOPOETICS OF POWERLESSNESS It is against this background of protest and activism by the BLM movement, that I’ll now introduce the work of John D. Caputo. My hypothesis is that Caputo’s radical understanding of theology in theopoetics can offer a vocative and potentially fruitful theological lens that resonates with the call of the BLM movement for racial justice. I will investigate this hypothesis in two parts. First, I’ll discuss three central aspects of Caputo’s theopoetics: (1) Theopoetics as a theological variation of Caputo’s radical hermeneutics; (2) Theopoetics is the insistence of a call; (3) A chiasmic intertwining: The powerless power of poetic making. In the concluding part, I’ll evaluate both the potential and limitations of Caputo’s theopoetics in light of the BLM movement. Theopoetics as a Theological Variation of Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics Theopoetics is a theological variation—or type—of what Caputo has been calling radical hermeneutics.10 Caputo’s radical understanding of hermeneutics intends, inspired by Martin Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of facticity,” to recapture “the hardness of life before metaphysics showed us a fast way out the back door of the flux.”11 It is what Caputo calls a “hermeneutic troublemaking,” in reference to the Kierkegaardian pseudonym of Constantin Constantius, which entails the nerve to stay with and not escape or “seek a way out of physis,” but to face “the fix we are in . . . and to work ‘from below’.”12 Like radical hermeneutics, Caputo’s radical understanding of theology in theopoetics is a hermeneutics that attempts “to stick with the original difficulty of life, and not to betray it with metaphysics.”13

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But what does Caputo actually imply when he argues for a radical understanding of hermeneutics? Why is it necessary to attempt “to stick with the original difficulty of life”? To answer this question, I’ll turn to what Caputo names the Jewish or deconstructive principle. This principle reveals the important influence of the French philosopher of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, on Caputo. As Caputo often insists it was Derrida who decisively “loosened his tongue.”14 The Derridean concept of deconstruction unveils that reality is never given as a directly accessible presence instead it always requires interpretation in time. As Caputo explains in Against Ethics, “a deconstructive analysis shows that the net is already torn, is ‘always already’ split, all along and from the start.”15 Derrida shows that the interpretation of reality is contingent, always already split, inscribed by what he calls différance. Derrida places the perspective of différance in contrast to “what our everyday understanding of the real presupposes.”16 Différance is for Derrida a term which is no term, Caputo argues, it is “writing under erasure, saying something without saying it.”17 This writing under erasure explains the deliberate misspelling of différance from the French difference, to point out that the process of giving meaning, of moving from sign to meaning, not only requires differentiation takes place but also deferral in time. This continuous process of différance shows the impossibility of grasping reality by using stable binaries of difference without simultaneously engaging in metaphysics, because it ignores the relation between presence and absence. Différance, Caputo contends, is a quasi-transcendental perspective that is “less than real, not quite real, never gets as far as being or entity or presence, which is why it is emblematized by insubstantial quasi-beings like ashes and ghosts which flutter between existence and nonexistence, or with humble khôra.”18 In sum, Derrida’s différance discloses “the deconstructability of any construction . . . by being exposed to its future, any given construction is exposed to both a promise and a threat”—that is, the original difficulty of life.19 This deconstructive principle will form the basis for Caputo’s post-metaphysical understanding of God as he seeks “an affirmation of a more radical Christian experience, an attempt to get closer to it, to feel its pulse, to get down to its inner life, to get down into its roots (radix), without the mystifications and confusions of supernaturalism.”20 As a result Caputo does not position theopoetics in this binary of either being for or against religion, rather he seeks a way to affirm this more radical religious experience of “something irreducible, something we cannot do without, is going on in religion, something happening in or to religion that religion itself does no grasp and even seeks to repress.”21 In order to differentiate between this radical undeconstructable experience of what is going on in religion—which Caputo calls “the event”—and the construct of religion itself, he makes the distinction

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between strong theology, on the one hand, and weak theology of the event—that is, theopoetics—on the other hand. Whereas “strong theology” traditionally revolves around the question of the knowledge of God, in the distinction between natural reason and supernatural revelation, weak theology alternatively reinterprets this revelatory distinction as the difference between a prosaic and a poetic discourse. In Caputo’s theopoetics, revelation is not simply beyond reason because it comes from on high, “but because it represents a shocking poetic insight or gripping poetic revelation unavailable to the concepts, propositions and arguments of logical thought, which are the stock in trade of classical theology.”22 Theopoetics should, therefore, not be misunderstood as merely being a differentiation in style or adhering to the poetic style of biblical poetry. Instead, as Štefan Štofanik rightfully shows, the objective content of what Caputo’s theopoetics is all about is inextricably embedded in how one speaks of and (existentially) affirms such a truth.23 To Caputo theopoetics, that is, “weak theology,” is: a loose coalition of discursive resources—of paradoxes and parables, of metaphors and metonyms, of striking sayings and memorable stories, of song and prayers, of homilies and letters, of figures and images, of semantic detours, deflections and indirections, of hyperboles and ellipses—all of which, collectively seek to evoke the force of what is going on in the name (of) God.24

Theopoetics, thus, deconstructs strong theology from the grip of supernaturalism and metaphysical propositions, “which leads us back (reducere) to the matter itself (die Sache selbst) of theology, which is the poetics.”25 Theopoetics is a poetics of the event, a radical hermeneutics of that what is going on in and under the term religion, which “brings to words the lived experience of the call by which we are addressed in the narratives and songs, the figures and the forms of theology’s founding texts.”26 THEOPOETICS IS THE INSISTENCE OF A CALL The distinction made above between religion and what is going in religion is to Caputo a crucial phenomenological distinction between the universal impossibility of the event, on the one hand, and religion as a concrete and determined historical belief, a croyance (belief), on the other.27 As said, Caputo is interested in unfolding a deeper affirmation of what is going on in religion, of the underlying experiences that religions express, the foi (faith) that is going on in croyance.28 Caputo’s argument is therefore not “that religious traditions lack truth,” but rather that the formal logic of propositional truth claims in which religious traditions assert the truth is not apt for the phenomenological limit experience of the event. “We need,” Caputo

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explains, “a different conception of truth itself and a fundamentally different kind of analysis of what is going in religious traditions.”29 Caputo introduces a decapitated interpretation of Hegel’s figurative truth (Vorstellung) or poetics that tries “to mediate an uncontainable, undecidable, infinitival event and affirm the possibility of the impossible.”30 Caputo states: The Vorstellung goes all the way down, interpretation is endless, resulting in a “radical hermeneutics” and consequently a radical or weak theology which cannot conceive of any absolute Concept and would in fact prefer not to. Any such Concept would arrest the play not only of religious discourses and practices but of cultural life more generally. Religion and art are ways to give words and form to the unconditional, but the unconditional does not exist; it insists.31

The Vorstellung or poetics of the event “comes in response to something in-breaking, in-coming, revelatory, world-reforming, and self-transforming, something which does not yield to the prosaic form of propositions and the standards of representational truth.”32 Hence, by its very nature, theopoetics revolves around the in-coming of the call: The insistence that insists on existence. Theopoetics seeks to affirm the event that stirs in or under the name (of) “God,” which “is the name of an insistent call or solicitation that is visited upon the world, and whether God comes to exist depends upon whether we resist or assist insistence.”33 According to Caputo, theopoetics “is the only way to make theology worthy of the event that happens to it.”34 The central notion of the call displays a delicate hermeneutic balance between insistence and existence, which Caputo calls “the middle voice.” On the one hand, the call is conditional because “a call is getting itself called in the traditions and languages we inherit . . . we start from where we are, where we first find ourselves,” and on the other hand, the call is unconditional as insistence harbors a fundamental hermeneutic openness, an “uncanny sort of thing or nothing that does not inhabit the house of being . . . it is not a Divine Providence transcribed into space and time but a more radical roll of the dice, a promise/threat, where the risk runs all the way down, where the folly is to follow the risk all the way down without turning back.”35 The call as a structure in time keeps the gap open between human conditional existence, in which the call is heard, conceptualized, affirmed, or rejected, and the unconditional insistence for existence, for a kingdom to come. The discursive and vocative mode of the call disturbs and haunts confessional religion from within, without end. Therefore, the proper voice of radical theology needs to uphold what Caputo calls a hermeneutic—that is, Messianic—openness, or religion without religion, which is what he means when he speaks of a poetics of the event. The impossibility of the event is “what we are dreaming of, what we are praying for, what we desire with a desire beyond desire . . . what makes demands upon us (in the accusative), unconditionally.”36

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Theopoetics, thus, brings to words this powerless power of being-claimed in images or narratives, of a call by “an uncertain, troubling, restless, and unsafe faith”—that is, “foi.”37 A Chiasmic Intertwining: The Powerless Power of Poetic Making Caputo’s theopoetics “releases the truth of . . . figures and stories . . . allowing them their proper force and leading them back (reducere) into their proper element.”38 Which means that these images and stories stand on their own and speak for themselves, “they are not backed up by a sovereign power who has passed them along by way of supernatural messengers.”39 Subsequently, the call insists on existence but has no power to back up this insistence. It stands alone in the night and we may respond or we may not. Theopoetics as the powerless power of the call depends on our response, on those who are being-claimed. The call calls upon us to make the impossible possible. In highlighting this dynamic between call and response Caputo shows that the theopoetics does not reduce theology to “a subjective projection,” instead poetic making (poiesis) is “a primal founding which gives creative form or figure to something that is not of our own making.”40 This response or affirmation of the impossible always follows the unconditional call—that is “the affirmation comes second.”41 Caputo’s theopoetics, however, not only emphasizes the distinction between insistence and existence, but also “the “chiasm,” the “intertwining,” of God’s insistence with our existence.”42 The latter is of equal importance, because Caputo does not intend to propose a “world-less” theopoetics. Poetics, he recalls, “exerts the powerless power of a story or a saying that cuts through prosaic life and leaves us shaken, disturbed, solicited, having revealed to us an alternative way to live.”43 The hermeneutical key to further understand Caputo’s proposition of chiasmic intertwining is the biblical story of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke 10: 38–42. In the story, Caputo argues, the behavior of Martha embodies the insistence of God which merges with human existence in this world. This reading of the story originates from the Medieval interpretation of mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328). For Eckhart, the story of Mary and Martha is an allegory of monastic life, in which Martha represents the via activa and Mary via contemplativa. In the biblical story Mary simply sat down at the feet of Jesus and listened, while Martha opened her home to Jesus and started material preparations. This leads to Eckhart’s conclusion that in contrast to Jesus’ literal announcement that “Mary has chosen what is better,” Martha secretly has Jesus’ preference because she has two gifts whereas Mary only has one.44

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Caputo takes this interpretation of the biblical story of Martha and Mary in The Insistence of God (2011) one step further, by interpreting the biblical story not merely as “an allegory of contemplation and action but as an allegory of the chiasmic intertwining of the insistence of God with existence.”45 Martha is the paradigm that the insistence of God, the call of the “other,” needs human assistance, it calls for a response. In as much as Martha turns to the material and quotidian needs of Jesus, she makes God’s insistence exist and real, while Mary by solemnly sitting and listening to Jesus stays unaffected by the needs of the world, a world-less theology.46 For Caputo, Martha becomes the radical hermeneutical model of theopoetics, while Mary forms the anti-model of a world-less faith that breathes Kant’s transcendental idealism. Poetics, thus, always requires an interpretation, a hermeneutics à la Martha of poetic making, where the “constellation of metaphors and metonymies, parables and paradoxes, images and narratives that cumulatively evoke the lived experience of the Kingdom, its forms of life.”47 Thus interpreted, Caputo’s theopoetics presents the topsy-turvy dynamic—the alogic of the cross—which takes a stand with nonbeing, weakness and foolishness, with the difficulty of life, with the “nuisances and nobodies (ta me onta)” of which Paul speaks in 1 Cor 1:28, and calls to be “existentially witnessed to.”48 CAPUTO’S THEOPOETICS IN LIGHT OF BLACK LIVES MATTER: IS IT RADICAL ENOUGH? At the beginning of this chapter, I raised the hypothesis that Caputo’s radical understanding of theology in theopoetics is a powerless call that resonates with the call of BLM for racial justice. Now that I’ve outlined three central aspects of Caputo’s understanding of theopoetics, it is time to evaluate both its potential and its limitations in light of the BLM movement. In this evaluation, I’ll draw on the work of Kelly Brown Douglas, the inaugural dean for Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, and introduce her book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015). Against the perspective offered by Douglas, I’ll assess whether the radical call of Caputo’s theopoetics is radical enough in light of the recent call uttered by BLM. In Stand Your Ground Douglas explores the “social-cultural narratives that gave birth to” and “the religious canopies that have legitimated”—what she calls—the current stand-your-ground-culture, which “has produced and sustained slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, lynching, and other forms of racialized violence.”49 Stand Your Ground is, like #BlackLivesMatter, a direct response to Trayvon Martin’s death and the acquittal of his killer. The book puts forward a mother’s perspective, as she wonders: “what

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is happening to our black children, especially our sons.”50 As a mother of a black son herself, she poses questions, and seeks answers. In personal scenes alternated with theological reflection she shares the lived experiences of difficulty, sadness, and pain that come with raising a black son in America’s stand-your-ground culture. Douglas writes: My son was about two years old. I had taken him to the park to play in a “Flintstones”-like car that was in the park’s playground. . . . Two little boys, one blond-haired, the other red-headed, ran down to the car where my son was playing. . . . My son looked on with the fascination of a two-year-old. The little red-headed boy, who seemed to be winning the battle for the car, saw my son looking on. He suddenly stopped fighting for the car and turned toward my son. With all the venom that a seven- or eight-year-old boy could muster, he pointed his finger at my son and said, “You better stop looking at us, before I put you in jail where you belong.” This little boy was angry. My son had intruded into his space. My son was guilty of being black, in the park, and looking.51

A personal incident? No, argues Douglas, this is the reflection of a stand-yourground culture in which “free black bodies have to be guilty of something,” even if they are two.52 The heart of her analysis is that the black body—and especially the black male body—is not merely inferior to the white body but a threat to it. It is the product of what Douglas calls “America’s narrative of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism,” which produced an ideological framework that not only “cherished white property/white supremacy, to sustain the superordination of the white body,” but moreover produced the “theo-ideological underpinning in the ultimate construction of the guilty black body.”53 This theo-ideology is a toxic mixture of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism and a distorted understanding of St. Thomas’ natural law. It suggests that God did not create all men equal, rather by creation “black people had a natural “inclination” to be subjugated.”54 In this interpretation of the natural law white people “are “morally” obligated to maintain the free space as a white space.”55 A free black body then becomes a dangerous body, because it threatens the social and cosmic order “living contrary to its presumed created nature.56 The standyour-ground culture that Douglas discerns is an attempt to keep “the black body from the white space (a free space) and returns it to the black space (an unfree space) in a way that seems reasonable and unbiased.”57 Hence, Douglas identifies a transformation of the construct of the black body after the emancipation, no longer marked as chattel it is now marked as criminal. Following this analysis of the construct of the black body, Douglas offers a description of black faith which she centers around the “paradox of the cross.”58 She argues that there’re striking similarities between the death of Trayvon Martin and Jesus’ death on the cross. In line with James Cone’s argument in The Cross and the Lynching Tree that Jesus’ crucifixion was a

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first-century Roman lynching, she states that “crucifixion was the brutal tool of social-political power . . . reserved for those who threatened the ‘peace’ of the day.”59 The cross and the crucifixion signals Jesus’ bond with the “crucified class.” According to Douglas, this bond, which she calls the “New Exodus” is most exemplary revealed in the story of Jesus with the Samaritan women at the well. In this story, Jesus intentionally goes into Samaria, crossing the boundaries between Jews and Samaritans and placing “himself in the midst of those most denigrated and marginalized, if not feared, in the Jewish world.”60 He interacts with a Samaritan woman, the most worthless of them all. As he crosses over these boundaries, Douglas concludes, “Jesus frees himself and the Samaritan woman from constructs that deem certain bodies as superior and others as inferior.”61 Douglas extends this intentional association of Jesus “with the most scorned and marginalized bodies of his day,” to black bodies in our current stand-your-ground culture: “it is in the face of Trayvon dying on the sidewalk that we see Jesus dying on the cross.”62 Douglas’ focus on the cross should not be interpreted as a glorification of a crucifying reality, for which Dolores Williams rightfully warns in Sisters in the Wilderness. Instead, she places the emphasis on “the resurrection, God responds to the violence of the cross—the violence of the world—in a nonviolent but forceful manner.”63 In this connection between the cross and resurrection, Jesus becomes “the embodied reality of the freedom of God that is expressed as a life-giving force.”64 Jesus stands in solidarity with the crucified class for “it is only when the least of these are free to achieve the fulness of life that God’s justice will be realized.”65 Douglas, therefore, perceives a task for the white religious community to recognize “the connection between Jesus’ crucifixion and the stand-your-ground murder of black bodies.”66 Especially in the light of history, where for a variety of reasons, the white religious community has remained silent or antagonistic about the violence, struggle, and oppression against black people. It is time, Douglas argues, that the white religious community acts, to “follow Jesus in this regard . . . [and] cross over into the space of the Samaritans.”67 THE POTENTIAL OF CAPUTO’S THEOPOETICS: THE OBLIGATION OF THE CALL Caputo is one of few white male theologians whose work attempts to follow Jesus all the way down to stand with the nothings and nobodies of this world, into the uncharted territory of the Samaritans of which Douglas speaks. I argue, therefore, that Caputo’s poetics of the event has the potential of being a theological ally to the political call of BLM for—that is, racial—justice and liberation as outlined by Douglas. In particular, in the radical emphasis that

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Caputo places on the cross. To him, the cross as the iconic space of theopoetics is “where hope takes wings,” and therefore, the beating heart of his thinking. In a poetics of the cross Caputo gives words to the call that insists unconditionally upon us. The call that calls for existence but depends on our response, a poetics of obligation, that is released from powerless suffering like that of George Floyd when he uttered: “I can’t breathe.”68 In what follows, in reference to the insights of Douglas, two facets of Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross will be considered to delineate its potential. Douglas emphasizes the “New Exodus” or the political bond with the crucified class in the life, ministry, and death of Jesus. This bond closely aligns with the deconstructive principle that guides Caputo’s theopoetics. In his poetics of the event, Caputo gives words to “a completely different story about a mortal God, nonsovereign, suffering, and divisible, ‘even the story of a God who deconstructs himself in his ipseity’.”69 To Caputo, such a theopoetics of the cross—as a variation of radical hermeneutics—is an ongoing process of destabilization of any construction or theo-ideology as it seeks to affirm the impossible “event” that takes place in and under the construct of religion. Like the story of Jesus and the Samaritan women at the well, Caputo’s poetics argues that the conditional constructs of human existence require constant interpretation. This reflects in the central theological category of theopoetics of the call which forces a hermeneutic or Messianic openness. In the eyes of Caputo a theology worthy of the name has the nerve to stay, to embrace the difficulty of life, to begin from below, “which means that . . . God descends into the mortality of our humanity,” this “requires hearing the sighs sent up into a seemingly heedless world by flesh laid low. It perceives (conspicit) the mortal and suffering God hidden in crucified flesh, wherever and whenever it is found, including today in the sighs of an earth suffering rape and ravage at human hands.”70 In this radical emphasis on Christ’s suffering on the cross, Caputo shifts the understanding of Jesus’ suffering away from “an economic exchange with a sovereign God demanding retribution (Anselm) or a means of self-purification (Luther),” toward the understanding “that in Christ, God as God, not just in his human nature, enters into and shares our suffering, the unjust suffering caused by poverty, need and oppression.”71 In the crucifixion—as a political execution—Jesus ends up powerless amidst the most marginalized. The potential of Caputo’s theopoetics in light of the BLM movement is its observation that the call for the impossible is inescapably political, because “the mark of God is on the face of the persecuted, and the political meaning of Jesus’s death is irreducible.”72 Secondly, in her analysis Douglas underscores the importance of keeping the crucifixion and the resurrection closely connected, because the resurrection shows that “the power of life that God stands for is greater than the power of death.”73 In a similar manner, Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross aims to

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keep the crucifixion and resurrection close together as the theopoetic space between memory and hope that lies in the call for the Kingdom to come. Both emphasize the importance of a nonviolent response to the human violence of the cross. However, unlike Douglas who regards the resurrection as God’s final victory over the powers of death, Caputo proposes an interpretation of God’s victory that is more radical, more theopoetic. In a radical theology of the cross, he argues, transcendence is uprooted by a paradoxical transcendence, “transascendence,” this term, which he borrows from the French philosopher Jean Wahl, points to what Caputo names: a “victory in defeat.” Which is what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas refers to when he speaks of the “impossibility of murder . . . [because] the arm of the murderer cannot reach as far as the infinite depth, dignity, and defiance of the victim, the insistence of the no that issues from the victim’s face.”74 A no rises up in an unlikely, difficult and insistent glory, from, for example, “the beaten bodies of Yeshua or the slaves of the South US”—in their very being persecuted.75 This “no” puts us in the accusative as “the bodies of the persecuted accuse us; they refuse to die, they call upon us to resist, they insist that we remember the dead, even as they insist on hope, inspiring a messianic hope in a world where murder has no place.”76 This is what Caputo means when he states that resurrection is a theopoetic victory in defeat: “(theopoetic) resurrection inspires insurrection against the powers that be (ta onta) that issues from the face of the nothing and nobodies of the world (ta me onta)!” In other words, to Caputo resurrection implies not a metaphysical escape route from earthly suffering, from the flux that we are in, instead it is the powerless insistence which calls upon us for existence. Caputo’s weak theology of the event, thus, attempts to give words to “the shock of the call, the interruptive, even traumatic intervention in our lives, the surprise of the unforeseen demand that it is addressed to us.”77 The ethical potential of Caputo’s theopoetics lies in this poetic space that transascendence opens, where it “breaks in on the business as usual of the world and call on us to imagine the world otherwise.”78 In Caputo’s emphasis on the response, on the need for human assistance to make the insistence of God real, theopoetics becomes a space of poetic making à la Martha. Not a world-less belief, but a restless faith that resonates in the provoking call for racial justice by the BLM movement, in the accusative that is placed upon white people. In conclusion, Caputo seeks to actively expose his work to uncharted territory, to break new ground in his engagement with feminist and black liberation theology—especially with the work of James H. Cone and Dolores Williams. In line with the deconstructive principle, he actively seeks the distruption and displacement that these voices bring to his own perspective. Unlike many other white men in positions of power within academia, he connects with the issues raised by the BLM movement sees the suffering and takes its call for

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change serious. To Caputo radical hermeneutics as an attempt to stick with the difficulty of life, to stick to the call, in this case raised by BLM, is not a matter of personal or political preference. Rather, this radical but vulnerable hermeneutic position is the only way that a theology of the cross is worthy of its name, of the event that happens to it. Consequently, I contend that Caputo’s theopoetics bears important potential for the theological discourse in light of BLM, because his work questions both the ongoing love affair of theology with the strong powers of metaphysics and its equally dubious preferential option for white men. THE LIMITATION: THE BODY IS POLITICAL Caputo puts the power that comes with his position as a white male emeritus professor to work, as he addresses and divests the power dynamic present in theology. Nevertheless, there’s something uncomfortable about an academic speaking from the ivory tower of academia about the people who are, down below, in marginalized positions. Of course, Caputo cannot change that his body is that of a white male, just as I cannot help that I’m a white female. And while there’s more to say on the topic, as the theory of intersectionality has taught us that there’re multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage in human existence at play there is, nonetheless, a powerless power in the recognition that one has never been on the other side. In the acknowledgment that one has never experienced the difficulty and hardship of existence that comes with the marginalization of certain bodies. Something that I had to learn the hard way during my time as a European theology student in South Africa. Therefore, I cannot help but wonder: Does the radical vulnerability that Caputo’s poetics of the cross proposes, not also require the existential vulnerability that comes with the recognition of one’s privileged (academic) position? What Douglas calls the (white) task of recognition? Is it, in sum, not necessary that the body of the researcher is inscribed into the research process? NOTES 1. Laurie Collier Hillstrom, Black Lives Matter: From a Moment to a Movement (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2018), vii. 2. Collier Hillstrom, Black Lives Matter, 22. 3. Toure, “A Year Inside the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 2017, https://www​.rollingstone​.com​/politics​/news​/toure​-inside​-black​ -lives​-matter​-w513190. 4. Collier Hillstrom, Black Lives Matter, ix. 5. Racial inequality in the United States dates back to the arrival of the first slaves from Africa in 1619. However, even after the abolition of slavery systemic inequality

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and segregation between black and white people continued to exist, which is why in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the civil rights movement insistently called for equal rights. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act made institutional segregation and discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin finally illegal. Formally, this Act ended institutional segregation and discrimination in the United States, nonetheless, in day-to-day life racial injustice for black people is still very tangible and visible American society. 6. Madeleine Kennedy-Macfoy and Dubravka Zarkov, “Black Lives Matter in Europe—Ejws Special Open Forum: Introduction,” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2020): 2. 7. Jean Beaman, “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in Europe,” Journal of Common Market Studies 59 (2021): 104. 8. Beaman, “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in Europe,” 104. 9. Beaman, “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in Europe,” 104. 10. John D. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (Fordham University Press, 2020), 119. 11. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1. 12. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 3. 13. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 1. 14. John D. Caputo, “Loosening Philosophy’s Tongue: A Conversation with Jack Caputo,” with Carl Raschke, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 3:2 (2002). 15. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 4. 16. Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh, The Philosophy of Derrida (London: Routledge, 2007), 56. 17. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press; Bloomington, 1997), 2. 18. The quasi-transcendental perspective of différance refers to the fact that différance in itself is structurally unknowable and, therefore, does not give the safety of traditional transcendence because it “does not quite exist.” At the same time, différance does have a certain impossible or “quasi-” transcendental nature given that it establishes “the conditions which make possible our beliefs and our practices, our traditions and our institutions, and no less to make them impossible, which means to see to it that they do not effect closure, to keep them open so that something new or different may happen.” in: Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 2–11. 19. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016), 29. 20. Clayton Crockett, “From Sacred Anarchy to Political Theology: An Interview with John D. Caputo,” in The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, ed. B. Keith Putt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018), 21.

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21. John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 18. 22. John D. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction: Suspending the Supernatural Signified,” Literature and Theology 33:3 (2019): 249. 23. See especially, Štofanik’s chapters on “Brother Paul” and the “Epilogue: How?”, in Štefan Štofanik, The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D. Caputo through Biographies and Events (Albany: State University of New York, 2018). 24. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 249 (italics my own). 25. Caputo speaks of the method of “theopoetic reduction” which makes clear reference to the language of phenomenology. He states: “a theopoetics is made possible by an epoché which suspends the supernatural attitude in order to allow us to adopt the theopoetic attitude.” See, Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction: Suspending the Supernatural Signified,” 249; To Caputo theopoetics is the effect of a phenomenological epoché that suspends the supernatural attitude in order to adopt the theopoetic attitude, which brings us back to the things themselves. See, Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 109–10; Finally, in Radical Hermeneutics Caputo already spoke of Husserl’s hermeneutic epoché as a gesture “which questions the authority of whatever calls itself ‘present’.” See, Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 4. 26. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 249. 27. The fact that the event is not a metaphysical statement but a phenomenological experience becomes even clearer in his recent publication In Search of Radical Theology. The event is not a normal day-to-day phenomenological experience but “a limit experience, an experience without experience, having to do with phenomena without phenomenality, which Derrida calls an experience of the impossible, whose possibility turns on its impossibility.” Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 110–111. 28. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 113. 29. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 116. 30. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 116. 31. Caputo, The Folly of God, 105. 32. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 252. 33. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 14. 34. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 251. 35. Caputo, The Folly of God, 78–79. 36. Caputo, The Folly of God, 32. 37. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 118. 38. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 251. 39. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 251. 40. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 252. 41. Caputo, The Folly of God, 32. 42. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 14. 43. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 249 (italics my own).

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44. Luke 10:42, NIV. 45. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 45. 46. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 44. 47. John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 20–21 (italics my own). 48. Caputo, “The Theopoetic Reduction,” 249. 49. Douglas explains that “the Stand Your Ground law is an extension of English Common Law that gives a person the right to protect his or her ‘castle.’ Stand your Ground law essentially broadens the notion of castle to include one’s body. It permits certain individuals to protect their embodied castle whenever and wherever they feel threatened. . . . While this law was initially invoked as a reason for Trayvon’s slaying, it was not used as a formal defence. Nevertheless, Stand Your Ground law signals a social-culture climate that makes the destruction and death of black bodies inevitable and even permissible.” See, Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), xiii. 50. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, xi. 51. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 86–87. 52. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 86. 53. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 50. 54. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 52. 55. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 60. 56. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 68–76. 57. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 80. 58. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 172. 59. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 174. 60. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 175. 61. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 176. 62. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 176–80. 63. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 184. 64. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 181. 65. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 197. 66. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 200. 67. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 201. 68. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 122. 69. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 106. 70. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 77–78. 71. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 82. 72. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 82. 73. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 183. 74. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 114. 75. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 113. 76. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 117. 77. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 106. 78. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 112.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Beaman, Jean. “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in Europe.” Journal of Common Market Studies 59 (2021), 103–114. Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. “The Theopoetic Reduction: Suspending the Supernatural Signified.” Literature and Theology 33:3 (2019), 248–254. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. “Loosening Philosophy’s Tongue: A Conversation with Jack Caputo,” with Carl Raschke. Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 3:2 (2002), https://jcrt.org/archives/03.2/caputo_raschke.shtml. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Crockett, Clayton. “From Sacred Anarchy to Political Theology: An Interview with John D. Caputo.” In The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, edited by B. Keith Putt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018. Dooley, Mark and Liam Kavanagh. The Philosophy of Derrida. London: Routledge, 2007. Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015. Hillstrom, Laurie Collier. Black Lives Matter: From a Moment to a Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2018. Kennedy-Macfoy, Madeleine, and Dubravka Zarkov. “Black Lives Matter in Europe—Ejws Special Open Forum: Introduction.” European Journal of Women’s Studies (december 2020), 1–3. Štofanik, Štefan. The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D. Caputo through Biographies and Events. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2018.

Response to Damen John D. Caputo

I want to thank Enrieke Damen for her thoughtful rendering of my work. She presents what I have to say so well she has put me in a difficult position of coming up with something to add. She catches the nuances, the qualifications, and gets my point. I appreciate the way she shows the continuity between Radical Hermeneutics, which is the work in which I found my voice, and my later more theological work. The “radical” in radical theology goes back to Radical Hermeneutics, which goes back to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of “facticity,” which means getting back in touch with our “factical” condition, the one which was already up and running by the time we arrived in the world. I am always trying to remain faithful to facticity, loyal to a fault, clinging to facticity like a man caught in a rapid clinging to a rock. I also appreciate her rendering of what I mean by theopoetics. That is the way I think we can demystify theology and religious discourse, on the one hand, and disarm reductionist secularizing critiques, on the other hand, and thereby get to the matter itself, die Sache selbst, of what is going on in what we call in Christian Latin “religion,” tapping into an Ur-religion, or archi-religion, running beneath the cultural beliefs and practices of the historical religious communities. In particular, I appreciate the way she sees that theopoetics means theopraxis, Eckhart’s Martha secretly preferred by Jesus to Mary, meaning that it is up to us to make the kingdom come true. My admiration for what she has written even extends to her final paragraph where she asks, “Does the vulnerability that Caputo unveils in his poetics of the cross, not also require the existential vulnerability of the recognition of one’s privileged (academic) position? What Douglas calls the (white) task of recognition?” I will try not so much to “answer” this question as to “respond” to it, to assume responsibility for it, to be put in the accusative by it, for it is 90

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the right question to put to white men in a profession that up until the not too distant past was still quite thoroughly dominated by white men. James Cone regularly makes the point that no one can understand the suffering of black people who has not “walked in our shoes,” as he likes to say. I completely agree. Damen is quite right about the security of tenured white professors (even if they are retired!) writing about people who are neither white nor tenured nor very secure. Allow me to make two personal recollections in this regard. The closest I have ever come to feeling like the “other” was when I was a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr, which had a number of graduate programs, including then an excellent doctoral program in philosophy, was an established and prestigious women’s college, a bastion of feminism already in the 1960s, with a very powerful Protestant-Anglo-Saxon Oxbridge culture. I was an Italian Catholic male from a blue-collar neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. I had attended an all-male Catholic high school and college and had been a member of a Catholic religious order of men. I had not been in class with a woman much less had a woman as a professor in an institution run by women, unless you count attending Catholic grade school under the nuns. But there I was, feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was not traumatic, and I was treated well by everyone, but I always felt like something of an interloper there. That not very sad story is as close I have ever come personally to what we theorize about under the name of the tout autre. So Damen is right to put this question to me. I am also reminded of the interview Mark Dooley conducted with Jacques Derrida about The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, where Derrida remarked that it took great courage for me to publish this book and also Deconstruction in a Nutshell, where I indulged myself in a certain amount of taunting of the analytic philosophers who criticized Derrida. I was recently asked about Derrida’s remark and I said it really did not take much courage. Derrida was always a lightning rod, in France, in Europe generally, and certainly also in the United States, and he could be the occasion of considerable outrage. When he was nominated for an honorary degree at Cambridge, what was ordinarily a pro forma vote of approval by the faculty became an international academic incident. He understood that the powers that be in philosophy in the United States are Anglo-Saxon “analytic” philosophy, to whom he is largely anathema. So he naturally assumed that I was taking a risk writing this book, exposing myself to an avalanche of criticism. I was not. I was comfortably ensconced tenured full professor with an endowed chair and was not the least bit vulnerable to anything any analytic philosopher had to say, and even less interested, since what they had to say, with a few notable exceptions, exposed their own ignorance and even hypocrisy. I wager that the people who signed the Cambridge letter accusing Derrida of scholarly “irresponsibility” had not read the books I imagine they would have liked to burn.

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It is no less true that when, in writing Cross and Cosmos, I made use of the work of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree and followed the interesting exchange between Cone and Delores Williams, I was in no risk of being lynched. I think that Damen’s question adds a new dimension to the paradox of apophatic discourse, comment ne pas parler, how not to say something, how to say something while unsaying it. So how can a white person say something—about Black Lives Matter—and also unsay it, that is, not presume to be speaking on behalf of black people, as if they cannot speak for themselves? I have an analogous problem with feminism, where I want to support the cause of justice that women seek without presuming to speak for women, as if they cannot speak for themselves. As an old friend of mine once said, being a white male is not all it is cracked up to be. But none of this relieves me of the responsibility to speak and write about these matters. As Damen herself emphasizes, it is important for white theologians to pursue the theology of the cross all the way through, to see the body of the crucified Jesus in the bodies of black people persecuted by a system that is rigged against them, all too often with lethal results. This speaking is not only permitted, it is demanded of secure white professors. To teach is to allow the event to happen, to clear the way for the inbreaking of the unexpected, the uninvited—like the inbreaking demand for justice now. There is a reason white supremacists are worried about what is being taught in American schools and colleges. They know teaching matters, that books matter, that thinking matters, that the entire academic apparatus of critical thinking matters—which they try to demonize under the name of “critical race theory”— and it makes them seethe with anger when they hear white people say things like Black Lives Matter. I have occasionally gotten hate mail for my “selfloathing” as a white person. I think perhaps that the best way to put this is to say that white writers and teachers can seek to be souffleurs, whispering from off stage, or supplementary clerks, who in our teaching and writing help to make straight the way for our students and readers to listen to people of color, to women, to indigenous people, to anyone and everyone who suffers exclusion and marginalization because they are different. Furthermore, we do not want to silence the multiplicity of interpretations. Novelists are capable of writing profoundly about the experiences of people different from themselves. Women and people of color will profit from the point of view of others who share their concern for justice and view it from their own standpoint. We can do this while listening to the people who are writing with their blood, speaking from out of their experience of suffering. White thinkers should be messengers trying to get out of the way of the message, signposts pointing in its direction, road markers which read Zu den Sachen selbst, where the mattering, die Sache Selbst, the matter itself, in Black Lives Matter and other such matters is to be found in people who speak firsthand, from the blood, sweat, and tears of their lives.

Part II

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC VERSUS HOPE AND LOVE

Chapter 4

The Foolish Call of Love George Pattison

This chapter presupposes that the alluring call that motivates Christian life is properly describable as a call to love. I don’t understand this as a very original statement. On the contrary, it’s one that many Christian theologians—ancient and modern, conservative and radical—might, in their different ways, be willing to accept. Where the differences start to become difficult is when we go on to the next step and start asking about where the call comes to us from, its “whence.” Does it come vertically from above, from “below,” or simply from our fellow human being? A whole lot of other differences have to do with how we should respond to the call in our lives in the world. Some would see it as compatible with states arming themselves with weapons of mass destruction and individuals having the right to own deadly assault weapons, while others would see it as requiring the renunciation of all forms of coercive and even defensive force. I’m not going to explore these latter differences in this chapter, although I do think that what we say about the “whence” of the call does give some significant prompts as to how we might—practically, ethically, and politically—respond to it. I’m cautious, though, being aware that the passages between fundamental theology (in this case, the question regarding the whence of the call) and the ethical realm (the realm of application) may take weird twists and turns. The one can’t just be applied directly to the other, which is why I limit myself to the suggestion that the most we can hope for will be “prompts.” But how might we, citizens of a postmodern, online, Anthropocene world hear such a call? There could be many ways to address the question, but I’m going to limit myself to one, focusing on the idea that the call reveals itself eminently in figures of folly and weakness. This proposal resonates with page after page of John D. Caputo’s writings over many years, perhaps most succinctly in The Folly of God.1 However, I am so largely in agreement with the 95

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position set out there, that what I offer here is less of a critical commentary and more of an exploration of Caputo’s argument in relation to texts that are only marginally considered in his own work. No one can cover everything, after all—least of all in a philosophy that does not aspire to totality. In particular, I shall focus on figures of folly and weakness as found in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. This will also involve two brief excursuses, one on Emmanuel Levinas (a philosopher whose work also reflects the influence of the Russian writer) and the other on Paul Tillich (Caputo’s “favorite” theologian).2 If this was simply a devout meditation addressed to those whose ears were already ready to hear, my procedure would need no further introductory comment. But before going any further, I would briefly like to consider how it might also relate to some current issues in philosophy and, more particularly, to phenomenological approaches to theological subject-matter. In a seminar that took place in the Faculty of Theology in Copenhagen on May 2, 2003, the late Paul Ricoeur said that the only way in which God could be manifest in the world today would be in a form like that of Shakespeare’s Poor Tom or Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin (the eponymous “hero” of the novel The Idiot). The comment was remarkable in a number of ways, not least because Ricoeur’s philosophical work had been marked by an exceptional intellectual modesty and rhetorical restraint. From start to finish, there was little if anything that might count as an avowal of the kind of divine folly or madness for which Poor Tom and Prince Myshkin provide notable exemplars. Yet even this most sober of philosophers seems, close to the end of his life, to have conceded the claims of folly. But just what was being conceded? Was this a philosophical concession or perhaps a theological confession? Or perhaps a point of indeterminacy, balanced perilously between the two? The comment was made in response to a question about the influence on Ricoeur of one of his own teachers, Gabriel Marcel, acknowledged by Sartre as representing a Christian kind of existentialism. Marcel believed that a philosophical interpretation of human existence could open out toward a religious commitment in which themes such as faith, prayer, grace, the exigency of love, and eschatological hope had a prominent place. In other words, Marcel practiced a “theological turn in phenomenology” about fifty years before the term became a major point of controversy in French philosophy. Ricoeur, by way of contrast, rigorously maintained the French academy’s insistence on secularity as a condition of public intellectual life despite his own personal Christian commitment, taking great care to respect the consequent boundary between philosophy and theology. How, then, do Poor Tom and Prince Myshkin relate to that long-disputed boundary between secular philosophy and sacred science, which, in our time, has become focused on the possibility of a theological turn in phenomenology?

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Caputo, it should be said, doesn’t share Ricoeur’s characteristic caution in embracing “the folly of God” as a proper theme of philosophical discourse—or, if not of philosophical discourse, then some kind of mongrel jewgreek, philosophical-theological discourse that can, nevertheless, appeal to a good philosophical genealogy if challenged. But whether such folly is acknowledged as a possibility marking the extreme boundary of old European rationality or adopted with new world enthusiasm, just what do these figures of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky mean for understanding the theme of divine foolishness and its relation to philosophy? In this chapter I shall focus especially on Prince Myshkin, the eponymous hero of the novel The Idiot, often spoken of as a candidate for literary Christhood, perhaps created so as to respond to the question as to what Christ might be like if he returned to earth in Russia in the 1860s.3 As the title of the novel already suggests, Dostoevsky’s answer (if that is indeed the question he is addressing) is a troubling one: that he would not appear on clouds of glory but might seem as absurd and as pitiful as—an idiot! In the larger context of Dostoevsky’s religious background, Myshkin also gestures toward themes of kenoticism and holy foolishness that are often taken as distinctively Russian, the humiliated Christ of modern Russian thought, as the title of one influential book put it.4 Indeed, elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s own authorship we seem to see just such a kenotic Christ in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, on which Caputo briefly comments.5 The Russian Prince and the Shakespearian beggar might seem at first glance to be two very different figures. Poor Tom (who is, in reality, Edgar, son of the Duke of Gloucester, disguised as a wandering beggarman) is a naked, shivering wretch, whom Lear described as a living example of “unaccommodated man,” “the thing itself,” “a bare forked animal” (King Lear, Act 3. Sc. 4, l.100-1). Myshkin, on the other hand, is indeed a Prince, and although he is penniless when he arrives in St Petersburg, it soon transpires that he is heir to a large fortune with plentiful means to do material good to those unfortunates with whom he comes in contact. With this contrast in mind, we might guess that the connection between Tom and the Prince might prove to be similar to the connection between one who needs salvation and one who is able to give it. Yet—and here’s the thing—both figures converge on a point of utter weakness and incapacity that is figured by both Shakespeare and Dostoevsky in terms of madness and folly. Poor Tom appears to Lear when the latter, in company with his fool and the loyal Duke of Kent, is caught in a wild, raging storm. They come to a hovel where Kent urges the King, verging on insanity, to take refuge. There follows a half-crazed half-visionary conversation in which Lear is eventually overwhelmed by the realization of his own folly in dividing his kingdom and yielding power to his two power-crazed and deceitful elder daughters, while

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banishing the one daughter, Cordelia, who truly loved him. When his actual fool asks him “whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman,” Lear replies “A king, a king!” (Act 3. Sc. 6, l.10-11). With this, the play enters a zone of uncanny inversions, where a king has become the equal of mad beggars and fools, and beggars and fools are the speakers of such wisdom as their catastrophic situation allows. Tom is addressed by Lear, and in a sense rightly, as “a philosopher” (Act 3. Sc. 4, l. 144) and his “good Athenian” (Act 3.Sc. 4, l. 169), that is, one who is engaged in searching out the true nature of things— albeit in a world in which, as Lear several times emphasizes, the whole order of nature has been turned upside and down. Tom, as we have seen, is a figure of “unaccommodated humanity” (Agamben’s “bare life,” perhaps?) and as these pivotal scenes unfold before us, we see that in this extremity even the King himself is exposed to every change and chance of fortune and weather. In this ordeal, Lear realizes that his own failure as a King is connected to his failure to acknowledge this basic human fact. As he famously reproaches himself, “Take physic, pomp, | expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, | That thou mayst shake the superflux to them | And show the heavens more just” (Act 3. Sc. 4, l. 33-6). Although many productions have Lear, the fool, Tom, and Kent as the only figures on stage, Grigori Kozintsev’s 1971 film transforms Shakespeare’s “hovel” from a small domestic dwelling to a barn-like space in which several dozen impoverished peasants are also taking shelter, giving Lear’s words a more compelling social and political application. Thanks to this move, Tom’s role as representative of all those stripped of their social support systems, deprived of the cushion of wealth, and without even a sufficiency, is powerfully underlined. What is at issue is not just the fate of this one small group of unfortunate outcasts and wanderers but humanity as such and the “unaccommodated” exposure to the storm of Lear and his companions becomes a figure of the human condition in which we all share. Words from the sermon “Love is Stronger than Death” by Paul Tillich seem apt. Multitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the earth or perish when artificial walls put an end to their wanderings. All those who are called refugees or immigrants belong to this wandering. . . . Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourselves in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history.6

There are two interrelated but distinct strands to the thought being developed here. In Lear’s “take physic, pomp” the spectacle of “unaccommodated man” presents a moral demand, while Tillich focuses on a shared being-toward-death

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that is not isolating, as in Heidegger, but, instead, forces the recognition of a universal vulnerability in which we all, despite appearances, share. These two strands are closely interconnected. The moral demand is possible only when we acknowledge the shared humanity, while the shared humanity already carries within it an implicit moral appeal. Yet Shakespeare would not have needed all his dramatic skills to make the point if this was simply a kind of natural moral fact or law that could be inferred from a general observation of how things go in the world. Really to see what is at issue here, however, is to find oneself caught up in an entire inversion of the average everyday sense of things. Few of us would go along with the pseudo-Hegelian claim that “the real is the rational” and still fewer with the view that “might is right.” Nevertheless, we don’t “proximately and for the most part” ask too closely about the global trading, military, and political structures or the accumulated historical advantages that enable us to live in comfortable, well-heated houses or apartments, to take holidays to culturally enriching or exotic locations, and to retire from work when we are (mostly) in reasonably good health. Because we are diligent in the duties that daily life lays upon us, we feel, as advertisers love to tell us, that we “are worth it.” Because we are not inhuman, we do also respond to charitable appeals, but these appear as momentary exceptions to the regular order of things. Once the moment of crisis is past, life reverts to normal. Levinas put the point in a manner that reveals a truly Shakespearean sensibility. The widow, the orphan, and the stranger, he said, are our “masters” and, as such, claim us from a “height” that is even more elevated than the “height” of the good beyond being that is the object of metaphysical desire. “The other qua other,” he writes, “is situated in a dimension of height and abasement—a glorious abasement: it has the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow and the orphan.”7 Such an invocation of height seems to resonate with the height in which God himself dwells and from which he promulgates the very law that commands our attention to the needs of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. This is not, I take it, a ruse to reinstate older ideas of “God above, man below” and to turn the ethical demand back into a kind of authoritarian heteronomy. Rather, it is to insist that everything we read of divine height and divine Lordship or mastery can only be understood in the perspective of defenseless and “unaccommodated” man. That is to say, it requires a thorough-going revision of what we might actually mean by “above” and “below” in such contexts. If we were really able to internalize this inversion, then we could no longer think of charity as a voluntary act of giving by those who have much to those who have little. There would and could be nothing condescending about it, as if we had graciously taken time out of our busy schedules to lend a hand. We would be merely doing our masters’ bidding, as we are bound to, being obligated to them by an infinite and unpayable debt.

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Levinas, of course, writes from within his own Jewish context, but the kenotic approach to the mystery of Christ seems to call for a similar inversion. It’s not just that kings are brought down to the level of mad beggars: the Lord of the universe himself now turns up among the thieves, malefactors, and nobodies whom Paul called “the scum of the earth” (1 Cor. 4.13), which seems a good point at which to bring in Dostoevsky, introduced to Western readers by Georg Brandes (who did the same for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche). Brandes wrote of Dostoevsky’s dramatis personae that “Physiologically as well as psychologically, all of them are the same poor and pitiable types, kind-hearted ignoramuses, sensitive simpletons, noble prostitutes, nervous wrecks, habitual hallucinators, gifted epileptics, and enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom of exactly the same types that we encounter amongst the apostles and disciples of Christianity’s early period.”8 You have been warned. I have considered Lear and his companions in the aspect of “unaccommodated man” who, in his desperate exposure to suffering and death, makes an uncompromising moral demand on us all. But it would seem that the maximum in this relationship of claim and assistance is to bear our affliction together and to become fellow sufferers who understand each other. But could there be more? Is our hope to be limited to finding shelter from the storm or could there be something like salvation, a definitive liberation from what another Shakespearean hero famously described as “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Brandes’s characterization of Dostoevsky’s fictional world is questionable in several respects, but he is only one of many readers to have sensed the messianic longing that pulses through so many of the Russian writer’s pages. Dostoevsky’s characters don’t aspire to become good, they want to be saved, to be brought back, like Lazarus, from the death that, in so many cases, is their life. And beyond this life, they want the hope of something more, an “eternal memory,” as one character refers to this hope in the closing pages of The Brothers Karamazov, borrowing a phrase from the Orthodox liturgy.9 So where is this salvation going to come from? Who is going to bring it to this motley crew of social misfits and outcasts? Who is going to be their Messiah? Of course, the obvious and most simple answer is also the correct one: it is Christ himself, the Christ to whom the New Testament bears witness and in whom the Church places its faith. Although he declared that his own faith had never escaped the “crucible of doubt,” Dostoevsky also declared his unfailing love of Christ, even if it were to turn out that Christ was not, after all, the truth. And Christ is not absent from the pages of Dostoevsky’s novels. Various characters read his words to each other or give voice to his sayings. He is

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denied, confessed, and imitated. On top of this he makes several personal appearances, the most extended of which is in the story known as “The Grand Inquisitor,” a story told by the anguished nihilist Ivan Karamazov. This, as Caputo points out, is an exemplary instance of the weak Christ. Returning to earth at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Christ is promptly recognized by the Grand Inquisitor and placed under arrest. Visiting him in his cell, the Inquisitor reproaches him for refusing the devil’s three temptations. You asked too much of people, he tells him. They don’t want the freedom you offered. They want to be led. To be overawed by “miracle, mystery, and authority.” Christ’s only response is to kiss the old man on his dry lips, whereupon the Inquisitor lets him go. The same message comes from another witness, none other than the Devil himself, or, to be precise, a hallucinatory simulacrum of that renowned personage who, later in the novel, visits the same Ivan Karamazov, now teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown. He claims to have been present at Christ’s ascension and offers Ivan a vivid description of how it all was, showing himself to be a fulsome advocate of the theology of glory. Crowns, thrones, hosannahs, and heavenly hosts are very much his thing, it seems— which I take to be indirect testimony to the truth (in Dostoevsky’s eyes) that the real presence of Christ is to be found in the exact opposite of this kind of spectacle.10 It is, for example, a presence that we see in the silent Christ who lets himself be taken captive by the Inquisitor or the Christ, also alluded to by Ivan, who wandered through Russia dressed “in a peasant’s garb.” No fireworks, then, just the incognito of those who, in Dostoevsky’s own time, were still, in effect, slaves.11 But there is a problem. Writing as a modern realist novelist whose stories are set in a world that would be recognizable to his readers as their own contemporary Russia, Dostoevsky can refer to Christ via the biblical text, legends, or the words of his characters. However, his genre excludes anything that might smack of supernatural intervention in the fictional real world of the novel itself. If Christ is to be present to those who inhabit this world, it would then seem that it can only be in one or other mediated form. But this is never going to be enough if we are to speak of salvation. Dostoevsky, it seems, has set himself a literary task equivalent to squaring the circle, namely, how to make Christ present in an immediate way in a world that knows him for the most part only as a historic memory and that no longer allows for the possibility of any miraculous divine intervention. Enter Prince Lev Nikolaevitch Myshkin. Whether or to what extent he can be taken as a Christ figure is disputed in the secondary literature, although Dostoevsky’s notebook comment on the “Prince-Christ” has suggested there is something to be thought about here.12 And he does seem to have a number of Christological features. In a manner reminiscent of savior-myths from

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Gnosticism to the Western, he comes from a mysterious other place to which, at the end, he returns. The opening description of his appearance has been seen as reproducing the classic Russian icon of Christ modeled on a supposedly miraculous image “not made with hands.”13 In an early scene, his listeners suggest that he has come to be their teacher and he declares himself skilled in reading people’s characters from their faces. He tells how he had helped a young woman be accepted back into the community that had cast her out on the grounds of sexual sin—that she is named Marie suggesting an echo of the penitent Magdalene, often conflated with those other sinful and adulterous women whom Christ protected and accepted. As the action of the novel gets into gear, he extends a compassionate acceptance to another “fallen woman,” the scandalous Anastasia Phillipovna. Indeed, he generally seems to offer an inclusive welcome to all manner of unsavory characters of the sort described by Brandes (and worse). Although he sees the motives of those who set out to swindle or otherwise take advantage of his simplicity, he accepts them all the same. He exchanges crosses with the dark and dangerous Rogozhin, a man who will later that day attempt to murder him. He is an epileptic, and we are told that in the split second before the extreme moment of his fits, he seems to be taken out of time and experiences an intense joy, as if transported to paradise itself. He seems almost to have one foot in another world. Let us suppose, then, that Dostoevsky intended him as an allegory of Christ, returning to earth and, more precisely, to St Petersburg at a particularly febrile and unstable moment in its economic, technological, cultural, and political development, a kind of urban wild west of unregulated capitalist expansion. But even if that was the point, and staying within the parameters of the novel’s realist assumptions, would any of the characters actually be able to recognize him for who he is and respond appropriately? Or would they be too much creatures of their time to be able to read his incognito? It is perhaps Anastasia Phillipovna who comes closest, since at one point she imagines him as Christ, although he is a melancholy Christ, sitting and thoughtfully contemplating the setting sun, redolent of the sentimental and all-too human Christ of Renan’s Life of Jesus, and not a Christ who has power to save (and who certainly doesn’t save her, since she deserts Myshkin at the altar where they are to be married and rushes away to Rogozhin, who kills her).14 Worse still, Myshkin not only seems incapable of saving others, he is equally incapable of saving himself (although this isn’t necessarily a disqualification for messianic status). When he is introduced in the opening pages, he is returning to Russia from Switzerland, where he has been undergoing an extended cure for “idiocy,” a condition that is not medically defined but which, prior to his treatment, had rendered him incapable of speech or interaction with the world around him. At the end of the novel and following the

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murder of Anastasia Phillipovna he relapses into a near-comatose state, not even recognizing the friends who come to visit him. If he is a Christ-figure, then, he is a strange one. Indeed, even non-Russian readers might spot that there is already something of a contradiction in his name. On the one hand he is Leon, a lion, perhaps alluding to the lion of Judah. On the other he is Myshkin, which translates fairly neatly, as “mousekin.” A lion who is a mouse, a non-conquering lion, whose roar, as it turns out, is little more than a squeak. Several times he is associated with the figure of the “holy fool,” a religious type more often encountered in the Russian tradition than in the West, but for all their holiness such fools remain foolish, outlandish even, in their actions and words. Making sense of what they do or say is likely to be near impossible.15 Perhaps most decisively, this lion-mouse idiot-fool Christ has nothing to offer those to whom he has come regarding the pall of death that hangs suspended over the novel from start to finish. Revelation 10:6, “there will be time no more,” is alluded to several times in the novel, giving an apocalyptic air to the proceedings. It is, then, a tale of the end-times—but what does it tell us about our fate “in the end?” In an early scene, Myshkin regales his listeners with stories of executions, telling one young lady of good family that the face of a man in the moment before the guillotine falls would be a suitable subject for her painting exercises (usually she prefers landscapes). Later, the Prince encounters a reproduction of Hans Holbein’s brutally realistic depiction of the entombed Christ and comments that a man could lose his faith in face of such a picture. Another character, a teenager dying of consumption, shares similar views of the painting, suggesting that if the disciples had seen him like that, then they could never have believed in his resurrection. The painting reveals the true nature of reality to be a blind, purposeless force that ultimately destroys everything good, true, and honorable, including the one who, as he puts it, was “worth all nature and its laws.”16 Following Anastasia’s murder, Myshkin joins Rogozhin, her killer, in a silent vigil by her corpse—but there is no hint of resurrection and the most that can be said is that Myshkin’s act does not leave the murderer alone in his unredeemed affliction. Afterward, Myshkin himself relapses into idiocy. Curtain. If the point of Myshkin’s quasi-allegorical Christological traits was to set up a kind of thought experiment, along the lines of “how would it be if Christ were to return to St Petersburg now, in our own time?”, the outcome, it seems, is not good news. He came to his own, but his own received him not and it all ended badly. In fact, it seems to end back in the misery of bare, “unaccommodated man,” that is, face to face with human beings whose civilization has been unable to protect them from the infernal machine of blind nature and from the destructiveness of their own cruel and twisted desires. If anything,

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Myshkin’s coming has accelerated the exposure of his friends’ helplessness in face of the internal and external forces driving them to destruction. Of course, revealing sin is also one of the functions attributed to the Messiah. But the revelation of sin is not of itself enough to bring about salvation from sin and in this regard a half-Messiah may be worse than no Messiah, since if there is no Messiah we may at least aspire to a morally inflected stoicism and get on with doing the best we can. Does Myshkin offer us anything more than this? At several points in the novel there are allusions to Don Quixote, and several of the characters seem to see the Prince himself as kin to Cervantes’ fantastical knight-errant. This might seem only to underline the point that Myshkin has nothing to offer except illusions. But there’s a difference. Whereas the Don is completely persuaded of his imaginary interpretations of the world and attempts to impose them on reality, Myshkin is far more discerning. In fact, he is as clear as any of those who opt for private or political nihilism as to the way things are. Unlike Don Quixote, he knows that his ways are not others’ ways and is at all times aware of how weird, different, and possibly comic he appears to others. Sometimes he even joins in the laughter. Like Dostoevsky himself he seems prepared to accept that at one level there is no escaping the laws of nature and that these will sooner or later bring about the inevitable extinction of every individual subjective consciousness. In many of the characters in this and other Dostoevsky novels this realization is either suppressed or generates one or other variety of resentment, fear, and violence. Faced with the pointlessness of their individual existence, such characters despair, commit suicide, or set out to destroy a world that they experience as antithetical to everything they value. It takes Dostoevsky a whole series of massive novels with a cast of thousands to begin exploring some of the manifold ways in which this refusal manifests itself. Yet there is an alternative. I have noted above how Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ functions in the novel as an ultimate symbol of the inexorable power of blind nature and its laws. Looking at this disturbing painting, Myshkin, as we have heard, comments that a man could lose his faith looking at it. Rogozhin, in whose house the painting is hanging, comments that that really is so and that this is just the effect that the image is having on him. However, in a rarely noted detail, Myshkin’s response is to say that he had been “almost joking.”17 This is a strange comment, but it suggests that Myshkin himself does not feel his faith to be threatened. In other words, even if death is the end, he still believes that the law of love remains valid. Or, as Dostoevsky said of himself

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in a much-quoted letter, if Christ was proved to be outside the truth, then he would choose Christ over truth.18 I do not understand this as endorsing post-truth in a Trumpian sense, but as saying that even if the reality disclosed by reductionist science is true and that human existence is an unrelenting struggle for the survival of the fittest that will end in death for each and every one of us: even if this is so, then, nevertheless we have the freedom to choose the way of love. Even if such a way has no demonstrable scientific basis and even if it goes against our biologically determined nature, we are still free to encounter our fellow human beings in the horizon of love’s call. In this way Myshkin offers a possibility for transforming unaccommodated man’s ontological distress into a call to love. His weakness is palpable. To the extent that he may count as a Christ figure, there is not a hint of glory. This is exinanition all the way: not just the humble but the humiliated Christ. Theology from somewhere far below below. Yet unrelenting in love. The folly of Christ, then: a revelation adapted to the predicament of unaccommodated man, which does not pretend that we are anything other than what we are but which foolishly, comically even, offers the possibility of living otherwise. Everything that science knows about human beings remains in place. The limits of philosophical enquiry are respected since there is no presumption of knowledge beyond what can be known without revelation. Hearing such a message, very little changes for us: but everything changes when, hearing the call, we act upon it. I said at the outset that this chapter is in essential agreement with Caputo’s account of the folly of God. Yet, as we follow the fates of Lear and his companions and Dostoevsky’s crew of “poor and pitiable types” and, with Caputo, affirming our hope for the coming Kingdom of God, we may feel that there is a note of tragedy in the human condition that is not exactly missing in Caputo’s account of the call to love but is scarcely audible. It’s clear that he doesn’t imagine that the coming of the Kingdom is a Hollywood success story, it is simply the extravagant possibility of being able to love and to go on loving in face of everything that seems to make love absurd, foolish, and idiotic. It is the antithesis of what Dostoevsky described as the hell of not being able to love.19 This is what must be always to the fore, the dominant theme, let us say. But perhaps (a favorite word of Caputo’s) it is also important to let the tragic counterpoint that indwells the call be heard.20 This does not qualify the urgency or the wonder of the call, but, as Tillich might have said, it reminds us that love is always “in spite of” all that militates against its possibility and its realization.21

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NOTES 1. See John D. Caputo, The Folly of God (Salem, OR: Polebridge, 2016). 2. Caputo, Folly of God, 8. 3. Out of a large literature on Myshkin’s Christological claims see Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 334–81; Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 102–23; and, from a philosopher of religion, Stewart R. Sutherland, God, Jesus and Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 150–62. 4. See Nadejda Gorodetzky, The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought (London: SPCK, 1938). 5. Caputo, Folly of God, 61–2. This was also a major point of reference for Tillich, who accepted Barth’s characterization of his work as a lifelong struggle against the Grand Inquisitor; see Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 26. 6. Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 171. In reading these words, we recall that Tillich himself arrived as a refugee from Nazi Germany as a political refugee. His words perhaps explain the often seemingly irrational reaction of many in Western societies today to refugees from the global south and Middle East. 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l”extériorité (Paris: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 281. 8. George Brandes, Indtryk fra Rusland (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1888), 409. 9. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1912), 820 (though Garnett’s translation misses the allusion). 10. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 686. 11. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 254. The allusion is to a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev. Dostoevsky himself drew the parallel between Russian serfdom and American slavery. 12. See the references in note 3 above. 13. See Irina Kirillova, Obraz Khrista v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo. Razmyshlenia (Moscow: Tsentr knigi VGBIL im. M. N. Rudomino, 2010), 82–102. 14. For discussion see my article, “Human, All-too Human. Anastasia Phillipovna’s “Portrait of Christ” in Eurozine, 15 December 2021, https://www​.eurozine​.com​/ human​-all​-too​-human/ 15. On Myshkin as holy fool see Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness. Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 71–98. 16. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 400. 17. Dostoevsky, Idiot, 212. 18. Quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Years of Ordeal (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1983), 160.

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19. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 336. 20. This tragic note may be implicit in his reference to the string quartet who continued to play as the Titanic was sinking, though this is not what is emphasized in his telling of this astonishing tale. 21. On the theme of “in spite of” see, for example, Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (London: Fontana, 1962), 163.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brandes, George. Indtryk fra Rusland. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1888. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God. Salem, OR: Polebridge, 2016. Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett. London: Heinemann, 1912. Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky. The Years of Ordeal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Gorodetzky, Nadejda. The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought. London: SPCK, 1938. Holquist, Michael. Dostoevsky and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Kirillova, Irina. Obraz Khrista v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo. Razmyshlenia. Moscow: Tsentr knigi VGBIL im. M. N. Rudomino, 2010. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer Academic, 2001. Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Murav, Harriet. Holy Foolishness. Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pattison, George. “Human, all-too Human. Anastasia Phillipovna’s “Portrait of Christ” in Eurozine, 15 December 2021, https://www​.eurozine​.com​/human​-all​-too​ -human/ (accessed 17 December 2021). Sutherland Stewart R. God, Jesus and Belief. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. London: Fontana, 1962. Tillich, Paul. The Interpretation of History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936. Tillich, Paul. The New Being. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955.

Response to Pattison John D. Caputo

When I started to write What Would Jesus Deconstruct?—this was a title in need of a book—I began by tracking down the source of the “What Would Jesus Do?” bumper-sticker theology of the Christian Right. I found, to my surprise, that it had a completely respectable—as in, not Christian Right— origin in Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? Sheldon was a progressive theologian, an antecedent of the social gospel movement in what was then, if you can believe it, a progressive Kansas who had an “evangelical”—which, if you can believe it, was a respectable word in those days—passion for social justice and, in particular, for the fate of black (he said “colored”) people. So he staged a scene in which Jesus would show up in Topeka, Kansas, one day in 1896 as a poor man in need of help and imagined the reaction. We can imagine what that was. He came into his own and his own received him not. Again! So the book flies in the face of the Christian Right whose disdain for immigrants and people of color along with their love of guns is in stark contradiction with the “original intent” of “What Would Jesus Do?” In my introduction to the book I mentioned that this is classic scene, one of the most famous instances of which is Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” in which Jesus shows up outside the Cathedral in Seville in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Lord Cardinal, recognizing him in the crowd, is incensed. Why have you returned? Why are you interfering with us, the Churchmen, who are in charge now? He then proceeds to explain to Jesus that his life is in his hands, “such is his power” over Jesus. The thing I singled out is not so much his account of the three temptations, with which I have some reservations,1 but the way Jesus hears him out in complete silence and, instead of having his angels descend upon him and strike his eminence dead, goes up to the man and gives him a kiss, which completely disarms the great 108

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man. The soft power of the kiss is greater than the power of the world. The Folly of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world. In The Weakness of God I point out that this divine folly is a venerable theologeme, that there is a whole history of “fools for God,” nicely presented by John Savard.2 Then, as George Pattison notes, I return to this story in The Folly of God, where I say that this is how things are done in the kingdom of God, which is a topsy-turvy, Alicein-Wonderland of paradoxes and reversals, all in the name of God. But when it comes to Dostoevsky, and to Russian literature generally, I am a cherry picker, singling out something really famous like the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” compared to Pattison, who is a mountain of erudition about this, as about so many other things. So I am perfectly delighted with and instructed by his account of The Idiot. Pattison expands the logic of reversal which, I argued in The Weakness of God, governs the “kingdom of God” in the New Testament. This very expression itself embodies its paradoxicality, that is, the basileia, the royal rule of what is unroyal and unruly, of everything that is the very opposite of a royal power; this is a kingdom ironice, an unlikely king and an unlikely kingdom. That Prince Myshkin is a royal, a Prince, is a perfect fit for the mad logic of the New Testament, a prince of peace and forgiveness, of non-retaliation, of compassion and mercy, a prince like Christ, as Pattison remarks, but all very unprincely as far as the “principalities and powers” of the world are concerned. Even his name is a paradox, a lion and a mouse. To speak of this as the “logic” of the kingdom is again to speak ironice, since it is, from the standpoint of the world, anything but logical; it is foolish, maybe even a bit mad, folie, a “holy fool” (yuródivyy). This constellation of reversals is perfectly described by Luther in the Heidelberg disputation as a manifestation occurring sub contraria specie, under the appearance of the opposite. Jesus is strong just when he appears weak, exalted just when he laid low, glorious just when he appears ignominious—with the “glorious abasement” described by Levinas and singled out by Pattison. Paul captures this logic in his account of the logos tou staurou (where logos means a message not formal logic) in 1 Cor 1, from which the title of two of my books has been drawn. As George Pattison points out, Paul does not hold any punches. He tells the saints at Corinth that they are not the best and the brightest, not well-born and well-bred, that they are the nothings and the nobodies of the world , using an expression, ta me onta, that would have caught the attention of the Greek elite who privileged the language of ousia and einai, and even that they are the rubbish, or as Pattison prefers, the “scum of the earth,” which is good Anglo-Saxon English, sans French finesse. I am struck in particular by Pattison’s singling out the passage in which the Holbein painting of the dead Christ “reveals the true nature of reality to be a blind, purposeless force that ultimately destroys everything good,

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true, and honorable, including the one who, as he puts it, was ‘worth all nature and its laws’.” But Myshkin’s faith is not damaged by this painting. Indeed, Pattison says, “even if death is the end, he still believes that the law of love remains valid.” This is to transform “ontological distress into a call for love.” Pattison here cuts to the chase of something I have chasing down from The Insistence of God through Cross and Cosmos to Specters of God, which is to incorporate into theology the prevailing view among theoretical physicists today that the universe is expanding at an increased rate of acceleration into oblivion, quite literally destroying the being of what is good and true and honorable—but not its worth. What is unconditional is not what exists unconditionally but is worthy of our unconditional love. Against this, the cruel and unjust execution of Jesus rises up in worth, in glory, in a “glorious abasement,” a “difficulty glory,” above the ashes of the world. In Luther’s theologia crucis, which Pattison is effectively linking up with Dostoevsky, it is not being’s everlasting, perduring power, its ousia, that matters, but being’s worth. The theologian of the cross, Luther says, is the theologian digne dicitur, worthy to be called a theologian. This, I want to argue, is to move the name of God out of the ontological order, of the being of the Supreme Being or of the ground of being, to the axiological order, not simply living forever but living well, living worthily, worthy of the events that happen to us, in a world which God, adopting the axiological standpoint, called good several times over. In the end, the name of God belongs to the grammar of love, the axiology of love, and love, as the mystics say, is “without why.” 3 As to the theological turn Pattison brings up, I would say that, once theology is relieved of the illusion of a supernatural provenance, and philosophy of the illusion that it is hard-wired to transcendental rationality, the theological turn is simply a change of subject matter, not a methodological transgression. It is to introduce new materials that philosophy has neglected but are brought out by people like Marcel and Levinas, who takes up the relationship to the neighbor in Hebrew thought and casts it in uncanny categories that sound seductively Greek but also oddly un-Greek, that are a little “Jewgreek,” to cite Derrida’s memorable citation of James Joyce. Pattison concludes that in The Folly of God I have left the note of tragedy “scarcely audible.” That may be so, but if it is, it is something that I have dwelled upon at such length, beginning with Radical Hermeneutics, that I am more often criticized for letting it drown out everything else. Maybe I had worn myself out talking about it. Either way, Pattison is right to insist it should not be played down.

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NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo, with a new Introduction (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997, 2020), 140n12. 2. In The Weakness of God I point out that this divine folly is a venerable theologeme, that there is a whole history of “fools for God” (106) and I refer the reader (318n7) to John Savard, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 3. This is the basic argument of John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, edited by John D. Caputo, with a new Introduction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Savard, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Chapter 5

From Kenosis to Kenoma The Enigma of a Place in Derrida and Caputo Agata Bielik-Robson

The purpose of my chapter is to analyze John D. Caputo’s concept of the “weakness of God” as inspired by Jacques Derrida’s attempt to venture beyond the paradigm of power and find “the unconditional without sovereignty,” which, in the Derridean corpus, is usually associated with the name of Khôra or, as he calls it in Foi et savoir, the “infinite wound.”1 The metaphor of the wound could indeed suggest that Khôra is a weak and humbled form of the Godhead—yet, the danger incipient to Caputo’s “weakness of God” is that it offers merely an inversion of the paradigm of sovereignty and, precisely because of that, still remains within this very paradigm. In his reception of Derrida—a great critical work which pioneered serious theological discussion on the latter’s concept of messianicity—Caputo is very attentive to the intricacies of the deconstructive strategy, but it seems that his own rhetoric, despite all his reservations still informed by the distinctly Christian notion of kenosis, performatively favors the logic of inversion: “in a strong theology, God is the overarching governor of the universe,” but, in a weak theology, “tohu-va-vohu and tehom have our sympathies from the start. They are the ‘nothings and nobodies’ of this story.”2 In what follows, I will try to prove that the simple reversal, even if partly fueled by the Derridean deconstructive critique of divine potestas, doesn’t yet do the trick. In order to approach the non-sovereign origin of letting-be (Seinlassen), one cannot rely on the idea of the depletion of power but must search for a completely new set of categories, which would evade the context of potestas altogether. The “weakness of God” must thus come with a twist: with a more decisive shift of perspectives, which will allow to escape the discourse of power, vitality, indemnity, health, and making-things-whole-again 113

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(restitutio in integrum), which Derrida in “Faith and Knowledge” perceives as characteristic of theological absolutism. Caputo’s brilliant and innovative interpretation of the Derridean Khôra gestures in this direction, but nonetheless stops at the threshold of the truly radical reversal, which, in the triton genos (third way) manner, would go beyond the dualisms and hierarchies of the power-paradigm; in his nolens volens kenotic rhetoric, Khôra is destined to remain the lowest and humblest “scum” of the Great Chain of Being.3 While for Derrida, Khôra is messianic, because it has a potential to get us out of all the religious Egypts of macho-mania, for Caputo, it is messianic only because it represents the lowest and rejected within the “Egyptian” distribution of power: the “poor ones”—anavim. In Derrida’s reading, neither messianicity nor Khôra are powerful and pleromatic principles of foundation, but they are also not simply “weak” and “at the bottom,” imagined merely as passive victims/ objects of God’s oppressive disciplining. They are selfwithdrawn (en retrait), an-archic “sources” of the desert/ emptiness/ tehom/ tehiru—but precisely for that reason generative in their own non-powerful manner, as place-making and letting-be. I will thus argue, pace Caputo, that in Derrida’s elaboration of the Heideggerian notion of Seinlassen, the “letting-be” is thought in terms which are no longer derivative from the divine infinite power, be it understood as the traditional creationist potestas, or its negation/depletion/ humbling. Both, Caputo and Derrida, endorse the self-deconstructive movement within the Graeco-Abrahamic heritage, heading toward a vision of Dieu sans Dieu—a self-questioning God without power—but while the former claims that it occurs for the sake of the “weak God,” the latter seems to seek a more radical notion of the divine “powerlessness” that would take us beyond sovereignty, that is, beyond power and weakness alike. What I therefore modestly propose is to replace the idea of kenotic weakening of the “unconditional without sovereignty” with an even more “desertified” notion of kenoma—void, abyss, tehiru—as the placeless place of Khôra which cannot be placed anywhere within metaphysical hierarchy, as neither sublime nor lowly. While the Christian default rhetoric of kenosis pushes Caputo to maintain hierarchical vision, even if inverted and focused on “the lowly recessiveness of différance, being’s humble hinterlands or underside”4—the concept of kenoma suggests a truly non-placeable space as the real “unconditional” which always already conditions and thus simultaneously undermines all hierarchies that take place within it. Thus, when Caputo states that “there is an interesting fluctuation or undecidability between the two tropics of negativity, between the discourse about Khôra and the kenotic, self-emptying desertification of apophatic theology,”5 I would like to loosen this link and argue in favor of the kenomatic discourse on the Derridean Khôra; while not non-religious, it does not belong to the Christian kenotics of

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faith, rather, as I will try to show, to a different tradition with which Derrida’s Marrano “religion without religion” secretly and seriously plays.6 ANOTHER GIFT: GIVING-PLACE, LETTING-BE To go beyond sovereignty means to go beyond power. If, in Derrida’s thought, sovereignty is best exemplified by the divine Absolute, infinite, omnipotent, and indemnified to any harm or loss, the Platonic Khôra suggests something else entirely. It is, as Derrida insists in “Faith and Knowledge,” the first, if not only, metaphysical representation of vulnerability, which, precisely because of that, has remained on the edges of the Western metaphysics, dominated by the imaginary of the unscathed power, as an unwelcome guest: It will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicized. Radically heterogeneous to the safe and sound, to the holy and the sacred, it never admits of any indemnification.7

It would, however, be wrong to think about Khôra in terms of just the opposite of the Absolute: Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Timaeus, where Khôra figures as an invisible passive place of spacing and a passive receptacle of the demiurgic activity, does not exhaust itself in the mere inversion of the metaphysical hierarchy. Derrida wants to venture further: beyond the metaphysics determined by the criterion of power and hence also beyond the dualism of the all-powerful and the all-powerless, the active creatio continua in time, on the one hand, and the passive reception in space, on the other. As Caputo immediately notices, although called by Plato a pandekhon, a universal all-receptacle, Khôra cannot even be properly receiving: “It is not even absolutely passive inasmuch as both active and passive operations take place in it. It resists every theomorphic or anthropomorphic analogy. It is not any kind of ‘it’ (il, id, quod) that is or does or gives anything.”8 The name Khôra, therefore, pushes us to think in a wholly different way not only about the metaphysical question of how beings came to be but also about all the issuing—political, social, inner-worldly—consequences of the idea of creation, in which the Western thought addresses the problem of power: either by stressing the “absolute dependence” of creatures on the omnipotent Creator or by trying to empower the creatures (anavim) in the face of the powerful divine Sovereign. The key to this venturing beyond sovereignty is, for Derrida, the Heideggerian concept of Seinlassen or letting-be—a viable alternative to the creationist model of ontotheology, which promises a new take on the modern metaphysics of finitude, no longer understood in privative terms. Caputo is thus

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absolutely right when he emphasizes Derrida’s mistrust toward the Heideggerian concept of Seyn as es gibt—a gift of being, which has as much potential/ power of indebting its recipients as any traditional creationist theology—but what he seems to ignore is Derrida’s willingness to take on the notion of es gibt and purge it from the regressive rhetoric of pay-back and return. In Deconstruction in the Nutshell, in the chapter on Khôra, Caputo explicitly distances the Derridean notion of Khôra from the Heideggerian one: Khôra is just there; “there is” (il y a) Khôra, and this meant in the most minimalist sense. This “there is” must not be confused with any generosity; it is not to be taken to mean that it “gives” anything, as in the German “there is/es gibt.” It is nothing kindly and generous, and does not “give” or provide a place, which is the trap that Heidegger falls into when he finds a “giving” in this es gibt which puts thinking-as-thanking in its debt.9

Yet, while Derrida is indeed critical of Heidegger’s An-denken, combining pious gratitude (Andacht, Danken) with thinking about Being (Seinsdenken), he is not so completely against the idea of khorein/spacing as a kind of giving. It may not give anything specific, but it nonetheless gives space to everything from which it subsequently withdraws into oblivion: while it “gives nothing in giving place,”10 it nonetheless gives place. As Derrida declared in his discussion with Jean-Luc Marion: “it is impossible for the gift to exist and appear as such. But I never concluded that there is no gift.”11 This donner lieu, even if “without the least generosity,” is thus a “gift beyond giving” which not so much rejects the Heideggerian es gibt, as rather revises it, precisely along the lines suggested by Caputo himself: By letting take place (avoir lieu), she/it does not give or produce or create anything. If in giving place Khôra gives at all, she/ it gives without giving and so without producing debt, even as she/it receives without incurring debt.12

Derrida often expressed his dissatisfaction with Heidegger’s treatment of Khôra, mostly because his es gibt was too involved in “negative theology in its Christian history.”13 He thus protests against the appropriation of the gift of the place by Christian negative theology, but does it mean that he automatically rules out other apophatic traditions? Perhaps, there is a room here for another candidate—the Jewish-kabbalistic one of the divine withdrawal (tsimtsum) which does precisely that: gives room and nothing else—that would fare better in approaching Khôra? Let us test this hypothesis. ANOTHER CREATION: GOD WITHOUT GOD “In the beginning, God created nothing”—with this paraphrasis of Bereshit Isaac Luria inaugurates a new metaphysical narrative in which the original

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donum Dei consists in neither creation of something nor in the continuous gift of providence. As Scholem puts it, “by positing a negative factor in himself, God liberates creation:”14 through self-questioning and self-negation, the Lurianic Dieu sans Dieu establishes a void (tehiru) into which he releases everything that he had contained in itself in an inchoate state before the event of space and time. Once tsimtsum, the first Event, occurs, Godhead— withdrawn, contracted, impassive, deactivated—becomes a “God without God”: a self-deconstructed deity, envisaged also by Heidegger as “the most extreme god, who knows no making [Machen] or providence [Vorsehen],” only Seinlassen, letting-be. In The History of Beyng, Heidegger announces the coming of this post-ontotheological “unconditional” which brings nothing except for a “time-play-space” or what Derrida will later call a serious play of différance: He brings nothing, unless himself; yet even then only as the most coming of that which comes. Ahead of himself, he bears the to-come of the future, his time-play-space [Zeit-Spiel-Raum] is beyng, a time-play-space that itself waits for the god, in coming, to fulfill it and in coming to come. Thus is the god, of his necessity choosing beyng, the most extreme god, who knows no making [Machen] or providence [Vorsehen].15

As Kearney rightly notices about the Derridean Khôra, perfectly fulfilling the characteristics of the Heideggerian extreme-god-to-come: “Giving place is simply a letting take place that has nothing to do with producing, creating, or existing as such,”16 and although he formulates his comments in a derogatory manner (for, what sort of miserable God would that be?), it is precisely this kind of divine giving that Derrida is ready to endorse. But the extreme God without God from Heidegger’s prophecy, who neither creates nor provides, is not a spectral arrivant from a distant future: this God is a revenant from the early modern lore of the Lurianic kabbalah which for the first time put the Talmudic term tsimtsum [contraction] to metaphysical use, by turning it into a primary creative act: the Infinite receding—withdrawing, retreating—for the sake of the alterity of the finite world.17 If there is, therefore, negative theology which would not be implicated in “Christian history” and simultaneously capable of capturing the Khôral withdrawal as an “active operation,” yet without the power-loaden discourse of theological absolutism—it comes to us from the “specters of Luria.” Derrida almost never mentions tsimtsum explicitly and rejects all anthropo-theological appropriations of the “deserted re-treat” which he wants to guard in its cold iconoclastic abstraction—yet, it is nonetheless Luria’s powerful vision that constantly shines through the Derridean selfeffacing spatiality of Khôra which is never described as “withdrawing” by Plato himself.18 In Timaeus, Plato presents Khôra as a passive, indifferent,

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and infinitely susceptible “receiving vessel” capable to accommodate all forms, and, by calling her/it a “nurse of generation,” he denies her/it even the slightest “active operation” that is implied by such Derridean (Lurianic?) terms as “re-treat,” “withdrawal,” or “making-place.” But it is precisely this residual operativity which adds a new dimension to the original Platonic idea of Khôra as “that in which (in quo) sensible things are inscribed, a tabula rasa on which the Demiurge writes.”19 As Derrida himself notes: “Khôra comes to signify this enigma of a place that Plato himself cannot think from the perspective of Platonism.”20 Would it be too far-fetched to assume that this residual activity of Khôra, in which khorein consists in receding for the sake of all things to appear—“letting take place (avoir lieu)”—derives from a different apophatic tradition: the one of tsimtsum, which radically questions God’s revealability not on the ground of his substantial ineffability (hyperousia), but on the grounds of his own retreat from revealment (haskala) into concealment (hastara)? Derrida’s Marrano idiom of practicing thinking in the Joycean “greekjew-jewgreek” style—to which he admits as early as in the essay devoted to Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics”21—may indeed be said to culminate in his treatment of Khôra which is being secretly reinscribed as makom according to “a deep affinity with a certain nomination of the God of the Jews, [where] He is also The Place.”22 It was the Talmudic tradition of naming God Makom/Place that gave canvas to Luria’s metaphysical speculation on tsimtsum as precisely the act of place-making, where the mystery of creation centers around the “enigma of a place.”23 Here I am merely adding another—Marrano—dimension to Caputo’s critique of Neoplatonism as a foil against which he positions Derrida’s theology in deconstruction. If, for the Neoplatonic thinkers, the fundamental question is: how the One can create the Many, or the passage from unity to manifold, the question for Luria rather is: how the Same can create the Other, or the passage from homogeneity to alterity. As such, these questions form two parallel versions of the Event in which there occurs the transition from the infinite to the finite. The Neoplatonic system makes no room for real finitude: the finite manifold is merely an epiphenomenon of the Infinite which never gives up on its eternal oneness and integrity. In Luria’s system, on the other hand, the Infinite truly recedes in order to make a separate free room for the things finite which are in that manner allowed to achieve ontological autonomy. Thus, while the Neoplatonic One makes no room for anything else in its circular hyper-pleroma pulsating in monotonous rhythm of exitus and reditus—the tidal movements within one cosmic womb—the Lurianic Infinite (Ein Sof) makes room, by creating kenoma/ tehiru out of itself and releasing into this horizontal desert all beings which are now no longer linked with its origin by metaphysical umbilical cord.24

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Caputo captures this vertiginous logic of metaphysical de-hierarchization very well, when he describes Khôra as “a great abyss (abîme) or void which is ‘filled’ by sensible things” and the process of letting-be as “a mise en abîme . . . , a vertiginous play of reflections.”25 If “the Khôra is an ‘abyss,’ a void of empty space,”26 then it indeed bears a likeness to the Lurianic tehiru/ kenoma: nothing (ayin) as a secret name of God/Makom who gives nothing but place and who belongs to another—not Christian and not Neoplatonic— apophatic tradition. So yes, “Khôra is not a normal origin or mother—she and the eidos do not make up a familiar family,”27 but there is something more to this abnormality than just a disturbance or inversion of the Neoplatonic “discourse of the Good”: there is a breath-taking vision of a new normality in which origin destines itself to self-absencing and leaving nothing but a trace of itself—the no-thing of pure Place: Khôra/ Makom/ tehiru/ kenoma or “the void of the most serious privation of God (Gottlosigkeit).”28 According to this apophatic, but also antinomian theo-logic, what appears as the very antinomy of the Godhead—an empty abyss abandoned by God’s presence—becomes the most secret name divine, the very key to the mystery of another creation. In the act of tsimtsum, therefore, God “a-theologizes” himself and becomes Dieu sans Dieu: God retreating from godhead, ein gottloser Gott. Pace Caputo, therefore, who states that “différance is Khôra’s cousin, not God’s. Derrida loves khôra the way he loves différance, illegitimate children both,”29 we could say that, with the Lurianic tsimtsum in the background, both, différance and Khôra become God’s close cousins and, according to the rules of this new metaphysical normalcy, quite legitimate too.

THE ANTINOMIAN VERTIGO: “EXTREMES MEET” Caputo is closest to this antinomian vertiginous mise en abîme when he juxtaposes Derrida with Lévinas. The doctrine of tsimtsum implicitly hovers over the comparison between the two thinkers: the older one following the Platonic “discourse of the Good,” the younger impersonating a sneering “bastard,” ready to subvert and overthrow the hierarchy of beings. Whether God from above or Khôra from below, they have one thing in common: they both withdraw from the world and retreat from view: The face of the other person, Levinas says in a very uplifting and beautiful image at the end of Otherwise than Being, is the trace God leaves behind as he withdraws from the world. Khôra, Derrida might say, in a more downgrading and not-all-that-beautiful image, is one of the traces différance leaves on Plato, on the Greeks, on philosophy, on us . . . as it “retreats” from view. As the spacing in which the traits of our beliefs and practices are inscribed, différance

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is in re-trait. . . . Not from above, as in the uplifting and edifying mode of Plato, Lévinas, and negative theology, but from below.30

Before, in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Caputo linked Derrida’s apophatic experience of the Khôra with the reversal of the Lévinasian categories: he attributed the Derridean “otherwise than being” not to the Good/God of epekeina tes ousias, but to il y a, the horror of mere existence. Lévinas himself did not exclude such reversal when, in “God and Philosophy,” he described God as “other otherwise”: “transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of his possible confusion with the agitation of il y a.”31 It was, however, Maurice Blanchot who turned the unnerving oscillation between the transcendence and il y a, equally “nocturnal,” undifferentiated, and potentially violent, into a major aporia of the Lévinasian thought, but also praised it as a right move: by stating that these two concepts are “ready to veer off to the point of possible confusion,” he made Lévinas his “clandestine companion,” like him capable of “writing at the level of the incessant murmur.”32 Caputo follows Blanchot and includes Derrida too into this clandestine company of the “writing of disaster,” the only kind of écriture able to penetrate the dead-dark, un-starred desert of the most empty kenoma. But is he himself capable of writing like that? Can such radical kenoma be approached in kenotic terms, even as refined as the ones proposed by Caputo? One of the distinctive features of the antinomian vertigo—the apparent anti-theses “ready to veer off to the point of possible confusion”—is that there is no longer any “below” or any “above”: no God on high and no Khôra underneath. When “Place” becomes one of the names divine, the whole hierarchy trembles and collapses. The idiom of kenosis may thus clash with “the uplifting and edifying mode of Plato”33 and the whole Neoplatonic formation, rightly criticized by Caputo for its disregard of finite things, but it still depends on the metaphysical hierarchy created by the very “discourse of the Good.” Thus, instead of the antinomian vertigo which demolishes hierarchical structure, we get merely “an almost perfect inversion”: The discourse on the Khôra thus forms an almost perfect inversion of the discourse on the Good. On the one account, things are described from above, in a tropics of hyper and au dela, beginning with the Good as the supremely real, hyper-essential, sur-real source of sensible things and the inextinguishable light in which they are seen to be the copies of their intelligible paradigms. That would provide all agreeable schema to Christian Neoplatonism, which seized upon it as a way to articulate its experience of the transcendence of God. On the other account, things are explained from below, in a trope of hypo and en deçà, beginning with an almost perfectly unintelligible or indeterminate origin, or non-origin, or pre-origin, in which sensible things are inscribed according to eternal patterns. . . . In biblical terms, it was perhaps a little more like the

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chaos over which the spirit of God bent. On the one hand, hyperbole and the excess of being, essence, and meaning; on the other, defection, less than meaning, essence, and being.34

Although critical of Christian Neoplatonism, Caputo nonetheless borrows its perspective on what lies below, en deçà, as a result of privation: the hypoessential subreality of Khôra is described in privative terms as “defection, less than meaning, essence, and being”—“this barren place, this desert, this no-place in which nothing positive, predicative, or entitative takes place, this withering, radically dis-placing place”35—and thus opposed to the pleromatic “normal” origin of the Platonic agathon. This inversive model also prevails in The Weakness of God. Having identified Khôra as the feminine underdog of the story of Creation, in both, Platonic and Genesis versions, Caputo targets a cryptognostic strain in the Greco-Abrahamic creationist narratives, which consists of the “highly hierarchical way of holding its nose above matter,” and proposes to “recover what the tradition considers the lowest of the low.” This recovery is to be enacted in the kenotic spirit of “sacred anarchy”: To be sure, a “sacred anarchy” moves in exactly the opposite direction of Gnosticism, because its whole idea is to affirm—to say “yes,” oui, oui—to the sacredness precisely of what is lowest and anarchical, to affirm hieranarchically the very things that would appear on the very lowest rung of any hierarchical scale. Gnosticism, on the other hand, is a highly hierarchical way to think that holds its nose above matter. The very idea of a sacred anarchy is to say yes in particular to our Khôral corporeality, our Khôra-poreality, our Khôral incarnation, and by so doing to come to grips with, nay to affirm, the only world we know, which is, we maintain, a beautiful but risky place, and event not an occasion for flight. Our emphasis on the primal elements of the story—flux and deep, darkness and wind—is made precisely in the name of recovering what the tradition considers the lowest of the low, matter/materia . . . which are annihiliated by the theology of creatio ex nihilo in order to allow God to create cleanly from nothing.36

Even if Caputo’s objection against the Neoplatonic Gnostics sounds right— just as Plato was unable to solve “the enigma of a place,” Christian Neoplatonism is at a loss with the enigma of divine incarnation as affirming this beautiful but risky world—his proposal of kenotic “sacred anarchy” is every bit a “highly hierarchical way to think” as in the case of anti-materialist Gnosticism. This may be one of the variants of the Platonic Left, but not the one envisaged by Derrida whose getting out of the Egypt of sovereignty into the desert of Khôra was meant to leave behind the two types of infatuation with power: the love of the metaphysical hierarchy which denigrates the finite material being, on the one hand—as well as the inverted love of the “lowest of the low” which loves it only because it is low and oppressed, on the other. For Derrida, the “baseness” of Khôra marks merely a starting point—the first

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base—of the complex antinomian procedure which aims at something more than just an “almost perfect inversion”: Khôra is not chosen by Derrida as the “lowest of the low,” but rather targeted as the blind spot of the whole hierarchical system, which has a power to demolish it from top to bottom. From the perspective of this peculiar “Place,” God and matter, the Demiurge and the Khôra, the high and the low, cannot be safely separated, because the latter always forms the “secret” name of the former: “extremes meet.”37 As Wolfson puts it in his meditations on tsimtsum, “The notion of withdrawal, itself withdrawn and thus not stated overtly, is a secret.”38 It is precisely this antinomian vertiginous identity between God and Khôra which animates Derrida’s theological tertium: and not, as in Caputo’s inversive interpretation, the exaltation of the Khôral-low in the kenotic vein of res sacra miser. At the same time, however, Caputo seems well aware of the higher antinomian stake which governs Derrida’s deconstruction of absolutist theology. Although naturally inclined toward a “highly hierarchical way to think” within the dualism of the strong and the weak with a kenotic emphasis put on the latter, he equally often notices that Khôra is indeed a triton genos: a “third” beyond any dualism. Hence a certain confusion in his clashing descriptions of Khôra: sometimes as feminine and sometimes as transgressing gender characteristics; sometimes as low and oppressed and sometimes as perfectly indifferent to all hierarchies to which it gives place; sometimes as a privative “defection” of the “normal origin” and sometimes as an an-archic affirmative principle of Seinlassen, the grand release of beings that “suppresses nothing”—or, in other words: sometimes as the kenotic lowest of the low and sometimes as the truly kenomatic source, an abyss which cannot be touched by any determination or placed within any hierarchy.39 On the one hand, therefore, he can write that “philosophy tends to stick to the father (eidos) and its legitimate son (cosmos) as if the father begets the son without the help of a woman—a bad biology to which the whole history of theology gives ample witness”40—on the other, however, he can also argue in a fully antinomian vein for a “feminism” that while constituting a strategically necessary moment of “reversal,” a salutary overturning that purges the system of its present masculinist hegemony, [it] must give way to “displacement,” which is a more radical “gender bender” in which the whole masculine/feminine schema is skewed. So différance, the “third kind” or genus, makes it possible to get beyond (or beneath) two kinds, not just to three, but to the “innumerable,” that is, to the indefinitely new, because differential, possibilities that are opened up once you acknowledge the contingency of “two.”41

Amen, hail to that! But why isn’t Caputo ready to acknowledge the contingency of the “two”—the high and the low—on which the metaphysical

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hierarchy is based? Is it because he still locates the process of theological deconstruction in the “strategically necessary moment of reversal”? Or, is it because he cannot pass beyond it, arrested in the moment of reversal by his rhetoric of the kenotic “weakness of God”? I believe it is the latter. The “folly” of kenosis eternalizes the moment of reversal and does not allow it to pass as a merely strategic stage: “The internal logic of the kingdom is the alogic—the folly—of the cross. Its dynamics are the movements of a kenotic abdication of supreme power of a Supreme Being for the powerless power of mercy and compassion.”42 It becomes, in Walter Benjamin’s formulation later on popularized by Agamben, a pure means: seemingly intermediary, it freezes as the only possible manifestation of the weak messianic force.

BEYOND KENOSIS: RETREAT, NOT A FALL Kenosis can also be said to make space. Metaphysically speaking, the adventures of the Christian Trinity repeat the Gnostic-Neoplatonic story of the Fall of Sophia who detached herself from the pleroma and plunged into abyss which she then embraced as her new abode.43 According to Hegel, it is precisely the kenotic trajectory of the divine fall from the “undamaged life” (unverletztes Leben) that first creates “the low” as the place of the world of matter: the place defined and affirmed by Christ’s incarnation, finitude, and death on the cross. The fall of Christ is thus a felix lapsus without which there would be no Real, only God immersed in his internal Trinitarian play (Spiel) with no effects ad extra. Yet, fortunate or not, it is still a fall, forever bound to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of plenitude and privation and making place out of deficiency. So, can we think the enigma of a place truly differently, without all these lapsarian connotations? Can we break with Neoplatonism for good? When describing the kenotic event which established the kingdom of God as a “weak force settling down below in the hidden interstices of being,”44 Caputo invites representatives of other traditions to add their own comments on the uniqueness of Christian kenosis: “I am not denying, in fact, I invite proposals for analogous versions of something like this event in other traditions upon which I am even less competent to comment.”45 By insisting on the oblique traces of Lurianic tsimtsum in Derrida’s discourse on Khôra, I merely oblige to Caputo’s generous invitation: not only because of Derrida’s own reservations against kenosis46 but also because Caputo himself tends to be critical of divine self-humbling as surreptitiously paving the way toward “a kind of docetism, in which weakness is an even more profound demonstration of power.”47 His unease with the kenotic discourse comes to the fore in many contexts. First, in his critique of Christian mysticism where, in “this rigorous kenosis, this language that attempts to empty itself of content [as] undertaken

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just in order to . . . save the name it crosses out,”48 he senses precisely “a kind of docetism”: a kenosis with safety nets, not ready to “start to head out into the desert, adrift with deconstruction’s ankhôral destinerrance . . . in the direction of a God without God.”49 Then, in his critique of Paul, where he warns us of the vengeful rhetoric of the reversal of powers, in which the Christian meek will have trumped the earthly political hierarchies: in Paul’s case, “weakness is but a preparation for the final staging of an extremely strong theology—when the God of Abraham will be all in all. . . . Paul has apocalyptic power up his apostolic sleeve.”50 And, last but not least, in his critique of kenosis as an instrument of Christian supersessionism toward Judaism, the old “Religion of the Father” emptied out and thus sublated by the “Religion of the Son”: “Deconstruction would always worry about a divine kenosis that resulted in filling up someone’s pocket with the transferred goods of divinity. . . . Jewish alienation is overcome by a kenotic process conceived as a zerosum economy that empties out the Jewish account and transfers its funds to Christian holdings.”51 Again, amen! But the question still remains: can Caputo himself give up on the idiom of kenosis—or is he doomed to endlessly revise it in order to purge it from errors and distortions? My purpose in this chapter was to respond to these moments of unease with the kenotic rhetoric in Caputo’s writings and retell the Derridean myth of Khôra in the altogether diverse language of tsimtsum as the divine retreat, which only prima facie appears similar to the Christian idiom of kenosis—and is often perceived like that52—yet, in fact, brings into play significant differences: most of all, this idiom does not stop at the “strategic moment of reversal,” but leads to a more radical transformation of the world, which metaphysically disables any earthly claim to power, by a priori disabling the favorite pet of every strong theology, the omnipotent Absolute: a move which Caputo’s weak theology fully endorses. If there ever was a vision which “followed this logic” to the tee and, in order to save the name of God, claimed that “we must do without God, pray God to rid us of God, seek God without God,”53 it was the Lurianic one which replaced the Neoplatonic story of the Fall with the story of the divine Retreat. According to this new narrative, there never was an all-powerful being that created everything ex nihilo as if from a clean sheet (the “Religion of the Father”), but neither was there a deity which fell into the world in order to redeem it (the “Religion of the Son”). All the “Ancient One” could do was to retreat into itself and create nothing, a perfect kenoma into which everything, once comprised by the Godhead, was released into the Zeit-Spiel-Raum, the timeplay-space of the future-open Khôra/différance. In Prayers and Tears, Caputo asks: “What do I love when I love my God, God or Khôra? How are we to decide? Do we have to choose?”54 No, we don’t have to choose if we truly understand the logic of this alternative

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tradition in which God’s most secret name is Makom: the absolutely empty Place. The God-Place does not make or provide as the old God of the creationist paradigm of potestas and its “maximizing metaphysics,”55 but merely lets be, by self-withdrawing and thus giving room for everything else. NOTES 1. In the exchange with Yvonne Sherwood, Kevin Hart, and John D. Caputo, called “Epoche and Faith,” Derrida says: “One has to dissociate God’s sovereignty from God, from the very idea of God. We would have God without sovereignty, without omnipotence,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27-50, 42. 2. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God. A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 9: 60. 3. While we are all forever in Caputo’s debt for his defiant defense of the religious significance of deconstruction—“Much to the horror of the secularizing deconstructors, the notorious ‘free play of signifiers’ which frees us from the shackles of the transcendental signified . . . has taken the form of the kenotics of faith”—it is precisely the latter claim which I want to contest. See John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon, “Introduction. Apology for the Impossible Religion and Postmodernism” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1–19, 5; emphasis added. 4. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 97. 5. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 37. 6. My essay is both continuation of and polemic with Richard Kearney’s critique of Caputo’s reading of Khôra: “God or Khôra?” in A Passion for the Impossible, edited by Mark Dooley (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 110–122, in which Caputo responds to his critics as well. For Kearney, Khôra is “just ashes and ashes, without ascensions into heaven. Abyss and abyss without elevation from the void” (110), so he rejects Caputo’s claim “that Derrida is at the same time on the side of the original desert fathers, the anchorites—or “an-Khôra-ites” as he rechristens them” (111). While I agree with Kearney that Caputo indeed attempts to rechristen Derrida’s Khôra (which he finds misguided, even absurd), I rather see it as a quite successful investment in the truly radical “kenotics of faith,” which manifests itself in Caputo’s “typically teasing inversions” (108). My critical thesis is thus a “teasing inversion” of Kearney’s argument: I will claim that, pace his objection that Caputo takes the “religion of Khôra” one step too far to be called a Christian, his kenotic-inversive take on Khôra is nothing but Christian, in fact, all-too-Christian. What they both seem to be missing—Kearney, by locating Derrida on the side of deconstructionist atheism (Khôra as “atheological absence of light and grace,” 114), and Caputo, by locating Derrida on the side of hyper-kenotic Christianity—is Derrida’s indebtedness to an altogether “wholly other” Jewish tradition which names God as the Place and

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reinterprets creation as a gentle act of Seinlassen that would not be possible without this abyssal, kenomatic, and seemingly nihilistic desert of Khôra offering itself as a “third” in between one God and the manifold of finite things. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone,” translated by Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–101, 58. 8. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 94, emphasis added. 9. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 93–94. 10. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit and translated by John P. Leavey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96. 11. Jacques Derrida, “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion moderated by Richard Kearney,” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, 54–78, 59. 12. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 36 emphasis added. 13. Derrida, On the Name, 96. 14. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. ­Werner Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 283. 15. Martin Heidegger, The History of Beyng, translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 179. The Derridean God without God has two sources—the Lurianic tsimtsum as well as the Heideggerian Seinlassen—but they are always syncretically combined, as in Sauf le nom, where the Platonic khora meets the gelassene Eckhartian-Silesian Gottheit/ divinity in the act of the Lurianic withdrawal: “there will have been absolute rarefaction, the desert will have taken place, nothing will have taken place but this place. Certainly, the ‘unknowable God’ (Der unerkandte GOtt, 4: 21), the ignored or unrecognized God . . . says nothing: of him there is nothing said that might hold.—Save his name (Sauf son nom; ‘Safe, his name’]—Save the name that names nothing that might hold, nor even a divinity (Gottheit), nothing whose withdrawal [derobement] does not carry away every phrase that tries to measure itself against him. ‘God’ ‘is’ the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language. But the trace of this negative operation is inscribed in and on and as the event (what comes, what there is and which is always singular, what finds in this kenosis the most decisive condition of its coming or its upsurging). There is this event, which remains, even if this remnance is not more substantial, more essential than this God, more ontologically determinable than this name of God of whom it is said that He names nothing that is, neither this nor that. It is even said of him that he is not what is given there in the sense of es gibt: He is not what gives, his is beyond all gifts (‘GOtt über alle Gaben,’ 4: 30).” Derrida, On the Name, 55–56. 16. Kearney, “God or Khôra?”, 109. 17. This version of tsimtsum, in which God “takes in his breath” and restricts his glory—the spectacular show of kavod blinding with the light—for the sake of something else to emerge instead, derives already from Isaiah, as described by Elliot Wolfson: “The notion of withdrawal, itself withdrawn and thus not stated overtly, is a secret exegetically derived from the verse ‘For the sake of my name I will postpone my wrath and my glory I will hold in for you so that I will not destroy you’ (Isa 48:9). . . . One may surmise that at some point in ancient Israel the notion of a

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vengeful god yielded its opposite, the compassionate god who holds in his fury.” Elliot Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 132–133; emphasis added. 18. There is only one explicit reference to tsimtsum as “linked to the mythology of Louria” in Derrida’s oeuvre, in “Dissemination,” an essay devoted to Philippe Soller’s novel Nombres: Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated by B. Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 344. Why does not Derrida mention Luria more often? Most likely because of his Marrano reluctance to be associated with any particular messianic tradition, the Jewish-kabbalist included, which all grow out of the kenomatic abstraction of the “desert in the desert,” and thus inevitably lose the radical iconoclasm of the “hidden tradition” in the process. 19. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 84. 20. Jacques Derrida, “Christianity and Secularization,” translated by David Newheiser, Critical Inquiry 47:3 (2021), 138–148, 145 emphasis added. 21. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1978), 192. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–35, 33. 23. Derrida, “Christianity and Secularization,” 145. 24. This release of beings—letting them to take place—which characterizes Lurianic Ein-Sof in the act of tsimtsum (or the Limitless All putting itself to self-limitation resulting in the gradual temporal “secretion” of singular things) can also be rendered in the Derridean idiom of Khôra as différance, perfectly summed up by Caputo: “Différance, containing all, including all the genders, all the places, is a pandekhon, not as a universal container mothering, nursing, or ‘holding’ all, but, more paradoxically, as an open-ended and porous receptacle of the uncontainable, of innumerable and incalculable effects, as an un-principle, an an-arche. Différance is an absolutely neutral receptacle—Khôra is its sur-name—that suppresses nothing, releasing the innumerable, the unforeseeable, the ‘invention of the other.’ Différance is the nameless name of this open-ended, uncontainable, generalizable play of traces,” see Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 105, emphasis added. 25. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 85. 26. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 86. 27. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 91. 28. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 53. 29. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 97. 30. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 98, emphasis added. 31. Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 ), 55–78, 69. 32. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Face to Face with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Richard Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 41–50, 49. 33. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 125.

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34. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 96, emphasis added. 35. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 37. 36. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 80–81. 37. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 192. 38. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau, 132. 39. Or, quite confusingly, both at the same time, as in this quote: “Khôra is indifferent to every determination—not serenely or sublimely indifferent, for it is too lowly for that and that is the wrong trope and tropics, but let us say abysmally indifferent,” see Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 94. 40. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 92. 41. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 105, emphasis added. 42. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God. A Theology of the Unconditional (Oxford: Polebridge Press, 2015), 105. 43. When it comes to presenting kenosis as a creation of the worldly space and differentiation, Hegel is, in fact, more Lurianic than Christian-Neoplatonic, which also means that he does not emphasize too much the lapsarian moment (Hegel, following Boehme, reserves the fall proper for Lucifer): “[The Son] is the difference— but in love. . . . It is the awareness that negation . . . is a true moment as well; now [the other is] estranged and [has] fallen away, and then [the divine idea] comes forth vis-a-vis this other-being. . . . At this point we enter the determinacy of space, of the finite world and finite spirit. . . . For finitude is properly the separation ‘of what in itself is identical’ [the Godhead in its originary state—A. B.-R.], but is maintained in separation,” G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 3: The Consummate Religion, edited by and translated by Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 199, 201; emphasis added. 44. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 9. 45. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 356. 46. Derrida expressed his dissatisfaction with the idiom of kenosis in many places, but most palpably in the preface to Malabou’s book on Hegel, where God’s selfemptying inaugurates the phenomenological process of divine self-recuperation as the grand reversal of fate: “Too much emptiness, too much fullness. . . . We should then accomplish one more step, add a supplement of farewell to this Hegelian farewell, and say farewell to this farewell of God to God”: Jacques Derrida, “Preface” to Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2005), vii-vlvii, xlii. In my interpretation, this “one more step” supplementing the “Hegelian farewell,” still to steeped in the “kenotic axioms,” is the concept of tsimtsum. 47. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 356. 48. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 43. 49. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 62. 50. Caputo, The Folly of God, 59–60. 51. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 81–82. 52. On the Christian tendency to confuse tsimtsum with “kenosis in creation,” see Simone D. Podmore, “Abyss Calls Unto Abyss: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in the Rupture

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of God-Forsakenness,” in Tsimtsum and Modernity. Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, edited by. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weiss (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 311–338. 53. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 62. 54. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 37. 55. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 221.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blanchot, Maurice. “Our Clandestine Companion.” In Face to Face with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Richard Cohen, 41–50. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. Caputo, John D. Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God. A Theology of the Unconditional. Oxford: Polebridge Press, 2015. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion Without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God. A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D., and Vattimo, Gianni, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “Abraham, the Other.” In Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith, 1–35. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “Christianity and Secularization.” Translated by David Newheiser, Critical Inquiry 47:3 (2021), 138–148. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, translated by B. Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Translated by Samuel Weber. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 42–101. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion moderated by Richard Kearney.” In God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon, 54–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and translated by John P. Leavey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. “Post-Scriptum. Aporias, Ways and Voices.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward and Toby Fosbay, 283–340. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Preface” to Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectics. London: Routledge, 2005, vii–vlvii. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1978. Dooley Mark, ed. A Passion for the Impossible. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 3: The Consummate Religion. Edited and translated by Peter Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. The History of Beyng. Translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Levinas, Emmanuel. “God and Philosophy.” In God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo, 55–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Podmore, Simone D. “Abyss Calls Unto Abyss: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in the Rupture of God-Forsakenness.” In Tsimtsum and Modernity. Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, edited by Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weiss, 311–338. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays. Edited by Werner Dannhauser. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Sherwood, Yvonne, and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. New York & London: Routledge, 2005. Wolfson, Elliot. Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Response to Bielik-Robson John D. Caputo

Deconstruction is most certainly not a “kenotic” operation, as Agata BielikRobson says, but to say it is the withdrawal of something in order to let beings be will not throw much light on the subject either. It is a theory of the relative instability of our constructions which tend to sediment and are in need of desedimentation in order to keep the future open and to keep memory alive. The work of de-sedimentation, of exploiting the instability in this relative stability, is called deconstruction. The explanatory theory behind this discourse is the famous notion of différance, which is a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility, the “quasi” meaning it produces unstable effects, unlike a Kantian transcendental which produces fixed effects. If I had to give it another name, instead of “deconstruction,” as I am sometimes tempted, I would call it a philosophy of the “event,” of the coming of what we cannot see coming, of the possibility of the impossible. The latter is a classical way of speaking of God, with whom all things are possible, including the impossible, which is where I see a link between religion and deconstruction. None of this anything to do with kenosis, which is why I have always kept a safe distance from that discourse. When it comes to deconstruction and religion, two of the main theses of Prayers and Tears were to keep in sight the Jewishness of Derrida (les Catholiques was the name of a colonial power which got him kicked out of his lycée) and also to avoid thinking that deconstruction is the hermeneutics of the “death of God,” the main reading of Derrida which prevailed up to that time. The latter I criticized, both in itself and as an approach to Derrida, for its Christo-centrism and supersessionism. If you want to think about God in Derrida, then we have to think of the “event” that is harbored in the name of “God,” the way the name of “God” keeps the future open and memory alive. 131

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Bielik-Robson’s chapter is a lovely contribution for which we can all be grateful to the cause of understanding what I like to call Derrida’s Jewish memory of God,1 a memory that was mainly refreshed by Levinas, but also by Benjamin. She introduces a trope—the Jewish-kabbalistic idea of tsimtsum, of God’s withdrawal and making-place—drawing upon Isaac Luria. Luria influenced Schelling, who speaks of the place in God where God is not being God, as Habermas and others have shown, around whom my Specters of God: Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (2022) turns. Schelling was crucially important for Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Heidegger, in all of whom I am deeply interested. Bielik-Robson seems to share my lifelong fascination with the “abyss”—which would certainly explain the instability of our constructions! My first book took up the interplay of Heidegger’s Abgrund with Meister Eckhart’s concealed Gottheit. Early on, I had the idea to write a book tracing the abyss from Eckhart through Luther’s deus absconditus to Boehme to Schelling’s Ungrund or dunkle Grund up to Heidegger, which, to a certain extent, I did in Specters of God, fifty years later. The abyss is a principle or un-principle, an anarche, or let us say a factor of disorder, chaos, darkness, anonymity, il y a, withdrawal, lethe, hiddenness, play, unprogramability, unforeseeability, undecidability, and nonknowing. Derrida’s reading of Khôra is one more trope for the abyss within. I speak of a factor because none of these things is to be found in its pure state—like a pure “monster,” which is the misconstrual of both me and Derrida of which I cannot disabuse my good friend Richard Kearney—but in a hybrid state of what James Joyce, another Irishman who loved Paris, called, quite felicitously, “chaosmos,” which I call, less poetically, a state of relative stability and instability. Deconstruction is trying to maintain a state of optimal disequilibrium and its great menace is rigidification, petrification, and absolutization. So I appreciate Bielik-Robson’s chapter and, if my name were never mentioned, I would simply say, “Amen.” But I do beg to differ with her on two points, my so-called kenoticism and what she thinks the deconstruction of sovereignty would look like. Bielik-Robson says that I have rendered the abyss, or Derrida’s Khôra, as a kenotic phenomenon. Here her ball bounces out of bounds. Khôra is nickname for différance and différance is not a kenotic phenomenon; there is nothing prior to it of which it is the voiding. It is the quasi-transcendental condition under which an instability shows up in anything, weak or strong, kenosis or pleroma or kenoma, in which they are inscribed. I do not weaken the name of “God” kenotically. I weaken it event-ologically, in terms of “event” that is harbored in the name (of) “God.” Or theopoetically: the logos of theology must be reframed as a poetics of the event. Or hauntologically, by spectralizing it. Weakness and weakening are not synonyms for kenosis. There are many ways, beyond kenosis, to weaken something—by translating

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it, redescribing it, recontextualizing it, reinventing it, rendering it more porous, spooking it—in short, deconstructing it. Weakness for me belongs to the idiom of call and response (could we say a “clessiastics”?), not kenotics. The weakness of God is that God does not exist. There is no God to weaken. There never was a God to empty itself. Weak theology does not recount the emptying or voiding of a prior plenitude. God’s weakness is God’s insistence, the weak force of a call without any power to enforce its call. Indeed, in Specters of God, I argued that weak theology should be thought not as kenotic, but pleromatic, inasmuch as the weak force of the call contained in the name of God acquires fullness, strength, or existence only in the human response. God is weak and we must make God strong. To be strong, God needs us to be strong. The touchstone point in Derrida for my weak theology is not his reading of Khôra, but his analysis of justice. Justice does not exist, justice insists, justice calls, justice is the weak force of a call for existence, and as we cannot make justice strong, we must make the laws just. Just so, as God—the event which calls to us in the name of God—cannot be made strong, we must have the strength to make the world look like what God is calling for, which is how God “exists.” That is my argument, and that seems to have gone quite unnoticed. So it is not an accident that “kenosis” or “kenotics” are words rarely found in Prayers and Tears. The text Bielik-Robson cites2 refers to apophatic theology as “self-emptying,” apo + phasis, saying something and then taking it back, like Hermes walking backward and erasing his tracks. The “kenotics of faith” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism simply means the structurally deferred coming of the Messiah. When I do bring kenosis up as a model for theology, I reject it. Emptying the divine plenitude into the world is the centerpiece of the death of God theologians whose courage and impudence I admired as a graduate student but of whose theory I am a critic. I criticize its use by Mark C. Taylor and Vattimo, whom I advise to take a closer look at Levinas’s notion of the “deflection” of God to the neighbor, as I point out in my response to Erik Meganck. Furthermore, I am not criticizing death of God theologians for Nietzcheanizing Pauline kenosis (which they do), because I also reject kenosis in Paul who treats the lowliness of Yeshua as a freely chosen act of emptying, hence as a model of obedience.3 But Yeshua was born and died a dirt poor peasant. His solidarity with poverty and death was not chosen, not a fate freely embraced by an eternal Logos who dropped from the sky and emptied itself into a Galilean peasant. Truth to tell, I did use kenosis once, in a quick response to a question from the floor about the Christian Trinity, which, as the questioner rightly observed, I never bring up (Cross and Cosmos, 45). So take that response to mean, if I thought that God exists, which I do not, and that in God there are three Persons, which I do not, I would end up in kenoticism, which I do not.)

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My consistent criticism of kenoticism does not go unnoticed by BielikRobson, but she thinks I am trying to repair this idea. I am not trying to fix this idea. I reject it. The first time I read her paper I was puzzled about how my views could be construed like this. The tipoff is the citation from The Folly of God (115–16)—the sole occurrence of the word in the book—where I am describing the logic of the cross (1 Cor 1) in the “kingdom of God” as a logic of reversals—between wisdom and folly, being and nonbeing, weakness and power—and I invoke Paul’s model of kenosis. My point was not to join the death of God squad but to say that, in the kingdom, the power of God is made manifest in powerlessness, God is revealed as Luther says sub contraria specie. So the logic of contrariety has to do with manifestness, not ontological fall or descent. As I said in the response to Rick Benjamins, I replace the schema of a mythological fall, of Adam, Adam Cadman, or anybody else, with that of undecidability and instability. It should be clear from reading every other sentence in that book, and the title of that chapter—“Does the Kingdom of God Need God?”—that God does not exist—not as omnipotent creature-maker nor as withdrawn space-maker—and that the weakness does not and cannot consist in emptying the power of something that does not exist. Now, as we all know reversals lead to “displacement,” and here there are two dangers. One is singled out by Drucilla Cornell and other feminists, which is too quickly to abandon the strategic reversal stage for displacement, because in feminism the work of reversing patriarchy is still unfinished. The other is to neglect to go on to displacement, which Bielik-Robson seems to think I have done with strength and weakness. The problem here is that Bielik-Robson thinks that the displacement or deconstruction of sovereignty means to come up with “a completely new set of categories, which would evade the context of potestas altogether.” Again, I beg to differ. The deconstruction of sovereignty does not lie in evading it but invading it, disturbing it, showing that it is always already disturbed from within, that is, is inherently unstable. The deconstruction of power lies in the multiplication and distribution of powers, not in replacing the category of power with an “completely new” category. On the contrary, the word remains readable under the erasure or Durchstreichung. Power is not a bad word and deconstruction is not its censor. (Nor is there any need to demonize “kenotics”; whatever its limits, in context, it represented an advance over classical theism meant to prevent the world from being swallowed up by God.) Just so, no word is good enough, not “justice” or “democracy,” not “place,” “love” or “God,” to keep us safe. The displacement of power does not erase the identity of power but shows that it is not identical with itself, that it is internally divided, limited, multiplied, and distributed, that it does not have an essence but a history, does not have a meaning but multiple uses, that it is not simply itself but iterable, reiterable, endlessly—for better or for worse;

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we do not know where this will lead. The worst things can be done in the name of democracy. The office of deconstruction is not to silence words, but to keep their future open and their memories alive. The deconstruction of sovereign power does not evade power. It does not deprive women of the power to resist the unjust power of patriarchy, or people of color of the power to resist the unjust power of racism. The deconstruction of sovereignty does not deprive Ukraine of the sovereign right to resist becoming a client state of Russia. “Hosti-pitality” requires the potens, the interrupted power of the host. The deconstruction of autocracy in name of “democracy” divides sovereignty among the people, producing multiple, limited, shifting sovereignties, the only rule for which is to keep the future open. Once displaced, then, there is a logic or alogic of undecidability, so there is, as I show, a strength in this weakness, which does not come as a reward for this weakness (economy) but a strength embedded in it, in forgiveness, say, which is what Derrida calls a force faible. Agamben is mistaken. The reversal is not a transaction, trading a means for an end. Forgiveness is not a means. It is a weak force that may get you killed. To deconstruct “power” and potestas is not to evade, excise, elude, exclude, or silence these words from our vocabulary and move on to some other discursive frame, but to make power just, to make room for the just power of nonviolent resistance in Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. (expenditure without return). Because justice cannot be made strong (it does not exist, it insists), so then the law (which does exist and has force) must be made just. Derrida’s “style,” his “exorbitant method,” which runs through every trope he uses—supplement, trace, margins, hymen, cinders, parasite, Khôra, ghosts, auto-immunity (if he had lived longer, there would be a couple more to add to this list)—is that of “strategic reversal,” to side with the underdog in any binary pair, the disreputable characters, the underprivileged, the outsider, the excluded. Why? They afford a tactical advantage, a strategic opportunity to displace the binarity, precise points of disjuncture where the instability and deconstructibility of the privileged member can be felt. They are the most detectable traces of their non-original origin (différance). They are, I say, a “tip off, a signal or a clue that philosophy is in a certain amount of trouble.”4 The most famous case of this, but frequently misunderstood, is écriture, where Derrida inhabits—he pointedly does not look for some “completely new” category—a notorious anti-Semitism and sides with the Jew, with the “dead letter,” over the “living word,” taking the side of vilified Shylock. But the reversal is tactical. He does not think that (empirical) writing is ontologically, axiologically, or chronologically prior to (empirical) speech. Philosophically, he could have spoken of archi-parole instead of archi-écriture. Rhetorically, he was trying to show the way that, in virtue of différance, speech too is a form of writing, that is, a matter of differential spacing.

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So if, in Plato, everything turns on the sun-king of being and truth, on the royalty of agathon, Derrida, predictably, looks for the Cinderella in the story, taking up Plato’s Khôra, the least among us, the poor thing, to show that there is trouble inside the Platonic corporation. The Platonic Khôra affords a strategic location, a trace left in the Greek language by différance, supplying us with a nickname for différance, the third thing, the triton genos, which underlies both Plato’s agathon and its opposite, Plato’s Khôra, indeed any and every binary opposition. In The Weakness of God (which is about God, not about Derrida), I took up this underdog tactic, which dines with philosophy’s sinners, because it ­represents a Jewish, prophetic “suffering servant” streak in Derrida that also shows up in another Jewish figure in whom I am interested, Yeshua bar ­Miriam, a first-century Galilean healer, exorcist and prophet, and a poem Yeshua composed about a topsy-turvy, paradoxical world he called the “kingdom of God.” The name (of) “God” is not différance; it is a particular nominal effect of différance, a datable-locatable Abrahamic effect, found differently, if at all, in other linguistic families, one more name in an endless chain of substitutions, which harbors an event made manifest in the prophetic solidarity of God with the oppressed. My deconstruction of Christianity is not a kenotics but a theopoetics, turning on the theopoetic figure of Yeshua in the New Testament. Yeshua provides the occasion of an intuition into the event that is going on in the name of God, which is that the trace of God is inscribed on ta me onta, the anawim, the poor, the hungry, the leprous, the lame, the imprisoned, the stranger, the sinner, from whom the call for justice arises axiologically, hauntologically, not ontologically. Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat? I hasten to add that none of this is to say that I am ungrateful, that I do not love and welcome and thank Bielik-Robson for what she is saying here about kenoma, which belongs to Derrida’s Jewishness beyond Judaism. A theology of kenoma and tsimtsum is in truth another theopoetics, a fetching figure, an inviting imaginative trope, a way our apophatic imagination has come up with to think the event that is going on in the name (of) “God.” I say it is an imaginative because everything we say about God is an imaginative figure. God does not exist. The name of God is the name of a focus imaginarius in which we dream of the possibility of the impossible, all of which is made possible by an open-ended quasi-transcendental misspelling, différance. For Derrida, the world is haunted, es spukt in der ganzen Welt, by a spectral disturbance (hauntology), by a call of unidentifiable provenance, and we in turn are called upon to answer a call we are not sure we have heard. Finally, if “place” too is an effect of différance, another trace in our language left by différance, another nickname, then, and I think Bielik-Robson and I are together about this, it cannot provide theological or kenomological

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protection against the disseminative and aphoristic energy of différance. Différance, which is older than God and his play, making them possible, is a place that displaces, that sees to it that things cannot settle in place, that they lack an assigned and proper place, and are subject to endless replaceability. So if we say that Khôra is a cousin of God, this suggests another God, a mortal God, one described by physicists today, in which this place is displacing itself, expanding into cosmic oblivion, destined to dissemination, a cold, dark destinerrance. If in the beginning is the word, in the end is Gottlosigkeit, Weltlosigkeit, Wortlosigkeit, Ortlosigkeit, no place. Very spooky. The abyss, again. NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, “Before Creation: Derrida’s Memory of God,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 39:3 (September 2006): 91–102. 2. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 37. 3. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 303n24; John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 23. 4. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. with a new Introduction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 99.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Edited by John D. Caputo, with a new Introduction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. “Before Creation: Derrida’s Memory of God,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 39:3 (September 2006): 91–102. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Chapter 6

A Post-Belief Europe and the Offer of John Caputo Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.1 The only true response to the work of John Caputo is poetic, the scope of his work is in many ways immeasurable, hard to quantify, and dangerously easy to reduce to notions and theories we either like or dislike, so the poetic must be deployed to attempt to capture the essence and the spirit of his thinking and writing which often escapes easy analysis. The only certainties in his work that we can hold on to are those named by Pessoa in his poem—the certainty of beginnings, of furtherings, and of interruptings that will always emerge when one encounters his work. Jack always makes you think again, always pushes you further, and is always interrupting settled and comfortable notions with his radical hermeneutics and sacred anarchy. The impossible, the event, insistence, différance, desire, hopeless hope, the unconditional, spectral, weak theology—these are all terms that conjure new ways of thinking about theology, about God, about religion. He speaks of Sacred Anarchy, the idea that shifts the conversational ground away from direct focus on God and mysticism and instead digs away at the coalface of the “sacred,” a broad umbrella under which much can shelter, named and unnamed. But to get inside sacred anarchy or any of his other themes and threads, one has to lay aside the hunt for dogmatic certainty or confessional orthodoxy, and be willing to traverse the transgressive world of postmodern deconstruction and travel into the upside-down world of radical theology. This prolific thinker, writer, theologian-philosopher has not only advanced and expanded radical theological thought, attention, and reflection, but he has also furthered the transformative work of Jacques Derrida by transmuting it in ways that have encouraged its needed appropriation within (a) theological paradigms. Jack has worked tirelessly with a devotion to new thought during his expansive career and the future of theology owes him 139

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a debt of gratitude. He has helped to generate new language in hopes of giving space and place to new theological realities and he has helped to reauthor old language that should rightly belong to contemporary theological discourse. We can’t say enough of his contribution. It is singular and extraordinary. However, would Europe say the same? Does Europe care about Radical Theology and the future of god? Why would/does Europe have a need for this sort of work? The European situation when it comes to engaging god and religion, sees many, if not most, as an institutional relic of the past and perhaps a reminder of simpler times, a time when mono-cultural views dominated and religion (namely Christianity in Europe), was an authoritative presence in society. In many countries it remains enmeshed with state and government, a form and a fixture in the cultural landscape, but seen as little more than part of a matrix of power-structures, that have little resonance with a world increasingly shaped by global corporations and digital media. A population shaped by secularism more than theism with a landscape dotted with cathedrals and churches that draw more attention from tourists than from the faithful. The roots of European cultures are shaped and bathed in notions of the divine. The images of the Christian God are everywhere, as are the ideas that shaped the way the West views the world, but for many they are little more than the ghostly vapor trails, undeniably part of the structure of Western civilization, and yet seen as largely inconsequential by the broad populace. The church, especially in Europe, is as Mark Taylor writes, often regarded as an “institution of privilege.”2 The Christian religion and its institutional expression is viewed as anachronistic and its God little more than a figment of imagination, a fearful imagination perhaps, a God of myth and conjecture, an “immortality project,” at best.3 The rejection of the dead god of institutional religion went hand in hand with the emergence of secularism; one powerful shaping story exchanged for another. But in the twenty-first century both traditional religion and secularism have become suspect. What has happened is a somewhat surprising re-enchantment of Western Europe through what was and is known as “secular spirituality.”4 In the 1980s various new brands of spiritism began to pop up further demonstrating Europe’s desire once again for a sort of religious engagement not relegated to and unregulated by institutional church/state structures. There may have been a systematic giving up on institutional, performative, and categorical expressions and understandings of god, but there is a lingering, a sort of circling back to the sacred whispers, the haunting a la Caputo. There lives an endless suspicion of something far more (or less, to be apophatic in the radical tradition) than, perhaps, Europeans have been previously exposed to.

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To look at history is to see that God has been dying in Europe for a long time and the catastrophic events of the World Wars and the Holocaust and the social upheavals which followed seeming to serve as final nails in his coffin. With the increasing materialism of European life combined with the ongoing privatization and minimizing of religious belief, what use could a world like this have for the work of the likes of one John Caputo? It’s the question that is ultimately attempting to be answered in this volume. But what kind of answer do we give it? What are the measurables and metrics for such a task? One could argue that the “use” of Jack’s work lies in the supposed secularity of European cultural life. Far from rejecting religion, Europe, like much of the Western world has simply shifted focus and direction with regard to notions of the sacred and the divine. Arguably, Europe gave up God and the institutions synonymous with his name, but replaced them with a search for something else. The desire for meaning still lives, but there has been a “rejection of abstract speculation with no bearing on life.”5 God, this word, this blanket we throw over the invisible to give it shape, has been re-made, re-configured and re-directed towards a more amorphous something, what Jack might call the “insistence of a call.” Julia Kristeva writes of our “incredible need to believe.”6 This push toward faith or belief that she identifies as lying at the heart of the human psyche and the history of society. We might, as she argues, be caught between this primal impulse and the “desire to know,” which is the result of living in a world shaped by rationalism and the demand for evidence, but we are still hungry for meaning. That meaning may no longer lie in God, but it is still found in our belief in human destiny and purpose and creative possibility. The tension Kristeva names is surely part of the hermeneutical challenge we discover in twenty-first-century life, about how we interpret the nature of reality. We might also say that religiousness was transferred wholesale into the secular theology of modernism, that we simply shifted the conversation, but that the old order still stands. Jack’s notion of religion without religion is surely worthy of invocation here. In his book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Jack begins to sketch out a religion without religion. Mining Derrida’s autobiographical writings, he locates a theological thread in Derrida’s deconstructionism. Derrida’s work has a certain religiosity according to Caputo, but without being religious and without religions’s God. Derrida speaks of the “impossible,” which for him means “something unimaginable and unforeseeable,”7 a desire expressed in prayers and tears. A desire that is fueled by what does not exist. Our desire addresses “all that we are and are not, all that we know and do not know.”8 Surely this is how we might grapple with that tension Kristeva speaks of, that space we constantly try and find ways of addressing, that empty void that is pregnant with possibility,

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There seems to be this nostalgic, wistful awareness of an invisible agent, which has been stripped of its initial cultural containers, but remains in the cultural ether, although one can only strip cultural containers insofar as you can strip one’s own memories, experience, language, and consciousness. So, in a sense, the imagination for god has been opened up but not blown up. It is clear enough that if there is a problem to be identified that Christianity, as is, can’t fix it. As Europe accelerates toward a more post-Christian and postbelief future, the work of John Caputo might find its way in. If there is a hope and a future for god in Europe, vis-à-vis the work of Jack Caputo, it is perhaps staked in the claim that “secularization is arguably the last master narrative that remains an article of faith in Western society.”9 The question for twenty-first-century Europe endures, what is worth belief? To introduce an aspect of why Caputo’s work will continue to be so important for re-introducing Europe back to a form of faith that will be more cultivating of one’s human condition and mindful of the temptuous desire for certainty, I think it will be helpful here to pan to the thoughts of French philosopher, François Laruelle, when it comes to the vital and critical distinction between belief and faith. In Laruelle’s Clandestine Theology, a serious indictment on belief and its perils is established from the onset. The “systematic distinction between faith and belief”10 is enacted from the beginning, as the readers are primed for a theological outlook that is clandestine, simply because it does not follow “any of the usual paths.”11 We are taken on a theological adventure in which we find “faith is the function of the ‘without-religion’” and that faith “poses a certain resistance to beliefs, while at the same time offering the means to handle them.”12 This is the main sentiment and heartbeat of this work: We simply cannot go through any of the usual paths. We can no longer employ the past to be interpreters of our faith. It only becomes a slumberous disaster that may sedate us for a while but proves deadening in the end. Can faith handle belief, yes, it seems so? But why not leave it free, disentangled, and disentwined from all that is killing it, maiming it, and containing it? When we speak of faith over and against belief, we are given room to experience event and, as Jack has urged us again and again, “to call for the coming of what we cannot see coming.”13 When presented with faith as, not only subversive to belief, but incendiary of it we find an invitation clandestine, and also as plain as day when presented with the befitting channels, language, imagination, and anticipation that speak to all we deeply desire that perhaps we are unaware of. Caputo would argue that we are not only surprised by our desire(s) but unaware of them.14 Belief is antagonistic and terrorizing of faith. It beats it to a pulp until there is nothing left but old ideological containers that we are forced to make do with when no viable alternatives are made known.

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This is what we can credit the work of John Caputo with when it comes to Europe: making the viable alternatives known. Presenting faith as free from the assailing and destructive constraints of belief, so that we may move freely to follow the whispers and the wind, the haunting and the taunting of the Undeconstructible, as Caputo’s work invites us to do. Gianni Vattimo in his book, After Christianity, opens with a brief description on his commitment to belief. Vattimo recalls a question from a former professor regarding his attestation to belief to which Vattimo responds, “Well, I believe that I believe.”15 These are words that Caputo himself has referenced. What does Vattimo mean by this? Simply that he believes with certainty that he believes, uncertainly. He has absolute faith in the lack of absolute. And it is because faith is a risky little wager, as theologian Richard Kearney might refer to it, we believe that we believe. We have faith in the uncertainty of our faith, that we engage with certain uncertainty. As Caputo contrasts radical theology from confessional theology, using rhetoric such as instability vs. unshakable, and instability and groundlessness vs. reassuring,16 he writes, “The disturbance constitutes the stuff of a radical theology, requiring an unnerving faith that runs deeper than the reassuring beliefs cultivated in the seminary hothouse. Confessional belief is eroded by doubt; radical faith is steeled by doubt.”17 The radical theology of John Caputo offers Europe the opposite of encased and mummified, ideology. To break with the apophatic tradition when it comes to characterizing and determining, to speak of the fullness of Caputo’s work, in its own right in Europe, would be to call it commensurate. It is ample and able when it comes to the challenge of god, theology, belief, and faith within the multivalent and multiplicitous horizon(s) of Europe. Europe lives not far from its historical memory, which has left its imagination incapacitated when it comes to what faith engagement might really look like. Yet there is a sense that there is a belief in what is believed. Not the same as the past, perhaps too rarified for the present and maybe too unidentified for a future already full of so much uncertainty and broken promises of modernity. European life and history is filled with ghosts, haunted every minute by the past, and constantly finding new ghosts in its graveyards. The latest ghost being what many thought would be the last great metanarrative, secularism. So, what is left for us, for Europe? What is left of faith, any notion of god and all that speaks to us in the night of our dreams, leaving us disoriented with vague and vapid memories of what we might have experienced or could experience once upon a time? All these ghosts haunting the collective imagination from beyond the grave—institutional religion, God, secularism, modernism, scientism, rattling their chains and spooking us and dredging up the past and covering our yearning with spectral mist. Luckily, Caputo’s radical theology is a spectral theology, and not afraid of ghosts. In fact this spooky theological

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adventure offers hospitality to our ghosts, opens the door for them, and in so doing fashions a haunto-theology which blurs the boundaries between absence and presence, between existence and nonexistence, between the old hidden truths and the new truths hidden. When it comes to Europe, “God is alive but not well.”18 From at a glance, we can see that “Europe is hardly godless,”19 but it is about the quality of belief and the quality of their god, the nature of belief and how that belief can metamorphosize into faith. This does indeed speak to what Andrew Greeley calls the “persistence of God”20 in Europe. Greeley speaks also of the nature of belief, siting that when one is asked about belief in God, one might come back with various counter-questions of the type of God such belief is inquired after. His play on words speaking of persistence as opposed to existence is easily identified, but insufficient when speaking of the problem of god and its future in Europe. Perhaps a better response might be the one Caputo offers us using language of the insistence of God.21 Europe is not seeking a God who exists, nor is it looking for that same God who persists, but the god who insists, as advocated in Caputo’s work might just give us our desires unknown and our invitation of perhaps.22 The work of John Caputo and the god that is weak and low vs. high and mighty, all that which is unnamable, uncontainable, unknowable, ­unconditional, and impossible, all that is coming that we cannot see ­coming and all that truly haunts us and whispers to us changing and churning our realities, never to be the same gain, is the hope of god in a post-secular Europe. This and much more is what we can give commendation to Caputo’s work for. I was recently having a conversation with a good friend who is a Dutch theologian but came of age in America within Evangelicalism. When I asked him what he thought regarding the reception of Caputo’s work in Europe, he had this to say, I have a feeling there’s little engagement on the whole. Academic theology has become a little more conservative but only where it exists. Radical Theology speaks to me because I’m basically an American Evangelical. That’s how I grew up. A stranger in my own culture. Now that I’ve done away with that I need it less, though it’s still important to show the world that secularism is deeply religiously motivated. I believe there is a resurgent interest among non-Christian and non-religious intellectuals to reexamine Europe’s Christian roots. Because those are still informing our subconscious. But that’s probably more something like post-theism or atheism a la Žižek. The interest is among the adherents are the remnants of Christianity, mainly. But the link between Radical Theology and the French philosophers makes for a creative pool to make something new. Also, while the U.S. has a religious culture, Europe still has the roots.

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My friend and colleague confirmed all I was thinking, hypothesizing, and questioning about the future of god in Europe. Why? What for? But the hope of Caputo’s work is found where all hope lies where faith is concerned. And that is in the biblical concept of remnant. While we don’t need it to be biblical to be useful, we will be in keeping with the heart of Caputo’s work when it comes to language, re-authoring old metaphors while also authoring new ones. The old, re-authored metaphor of remnant combined with the new metaphor of remainder. What is it that remains of god? What remains of our desires, our longings, all we have hoped for, wondered about and searched for? Only nothing that we could have expected. Could the work be for the masses? Yes. But is it? Has the task of remnant ever been to address the masses? The roots of religious Europe could spring up, but perhaps only through what Caputo calls, taking his cues from Tillich, “proto-religion.” A religionless religion that is only understood by yielding ourselves to the reality and possibility that the word “God” is simply “one of the ways we give words to the unconditional, one of the ways that the unconditional happens in our lives.”23 There are many ways in which this proto-religion is the unconditional occurring within the landscape of our lives. But this also takes the bravery to suspend belief and give ourselves in good faith over to the conditions in which we can experience the event of the unconditional, perhaps. The work of John Caputo isn’t for anyone looking for a quick fix, to switch from one brand of certainty to another or to trade one type of belief for a more acceptable one. Caputo admits, like Taylor and inspired by Lacan, that “as long as we greet the future with fear and anxiety . . . there will always be the comfort-giving God . . . a ready-with-an-answer religion, the God of those for whom the unconditional is reduced to a Supreme being.”24 In the post-secular climate of Europe, rooted in worldview authored by institution and religion, but winged with possibility, or perhaps the impossible, John Caputo’s work offers a dynamic of freedom, yet all that is unfamiliar and unexplored. While at the same time, sitting in the tension of recollection and reminiscence of all we have known. So, the question is does the work of John Caputo have any legs in Europe? The question I began with that is unanswered still—the investigation at the heart of this volume in which we writers are the detectives and the readers shall be the judge—does Caputo’s work make any difference within the affairs and concerns of Europe in the twenty-first century? How has the work of John Caputo been received in Europe? Is it a redeemed Europe? A regenerated, recovered, renewed Europe because of his work? To ask the same question Caputo does, “Can religion and theology live on in postmodern times and in whatever “post-” postdates postmodernism?”25 And also, “Is religion worth lasting?”26 Only by a hope and a prayer of a most radical nature.

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NOTES 1. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (Lulu Press, 2013), 61. 2. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96. 3. Taylor, After God, 97. 4. Lynn L. Sharp, Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), xiv. 5. W. Warren Wager, ed., European Intellectual History Since Darwin and Marx: Selected Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 204. 6. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 7. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tear of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). 8. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 3. 9. Sanja Perovic, ed., Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France: Fragments of Religion (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 1. 10. François Laruelle, Clandestine Theology: A Non-Philosopher’s Confession of Faith, translated by Andrew Sackin-Poll (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), viii. 11. Laruelle, Clandestine Theology, viii. 12. Laruelle, Clandestine Theology, viii. 13. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 51. 14. Caputo, Prayers and Tear, 3. 15. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, translated by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1–2. 16. John D. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 4. 17. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 4. 18. Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 4. 19. Greeley, Religion in Europe, 19. 20. Greeley, Religion in Europe, 1. 21. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013). 22. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 3. 23. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016), 45. 24. Caputo, The Folly of God, 48. 25. Caputo, The Folly of God, 47. 26. Caputo, The Folly of God, 50.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tear of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Greeley, Andrew M. Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003. Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need To Believe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Laruelle, François. Clandestine Theology: A Non-Philosopher’s Confession of Faith. Translated by Andrew Sackin-Poll. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Perovic, Sanja, ed. Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France: Fragments of Religion. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. Sharp, Lynn L. Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in NineteenthCentury France. New York: Lexington Books, 2006. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. Translated by Luca D’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Wager, Warren W., ed. European Intellectual History Since Darwin and Marx: Selected Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. Lulu Press, 2013, 61.

Response to French and Taylor John D. Caputo

I am deeply grateful to Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor for raising a question about the European scene which cuts to the core of radical theology, to the question that I have been musing over for longer than I can remember. Is it time to say that the time is up for religion, the name and the thing, in Europe or the United States? Has the time come to move on? The question concerns the future of religion, whether it deserves to have a future. It just may be that religion is no longer up to the task it has been given, to be the place where the event that is taking place in and under the name of God is made visible, palpable, doable, and honesty demands that it step back and let other things take its place. Like what? Let us count the ways. Like the work of art, which is the product of sensibilities tuned to the event who have the vision, the creativity, to give the event word or song or shape. Like the poem by Fernando Pessoa which French and Taylor use as an epigraph to their chapter. Like the speculative cosmologists who are today beginning to gather information about the most distant stars, the first light to emanate from the big bang, and who are better equipped than the rest of us to finish the sentence that starts “In the beginning. . . .” Like people who put themselves in harm’s way in order to serve others, enacting the word of the prophets to make justice flow like water over the land. In other words, the subject matter of religion is not God; it is what is going on in the name of God, which Tillich called the “unconditional,” which, as Tillich argued, can be found anywhere and everywhere in the culture. Start anywhere you want in the culture, in high culture or in ordinary life, and dig deep enough and you will hit theological ground. In radical theology, every theology is a theology of culture. The only reason we need “religion” in the narrow and traditional sense is because of our inattentiveness and present state of distraction. If we are alive to the unconditional, each in our own way, we do not need religion. It is not religious 148

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beliefs that matter but an underlying faith, and that just may be the point to which secularization has driven us, what secularization has made us realize. French and Taylor have written about Europe while I am writing in the context of the United States where the “secularization” thesis has taken quite a beating. At the present time, two-thirds of the Supreme Court is made up of Roman Catholics, who make up only twenty percent of the population, and the reactionary agenda of the Christian Right has achieved an unprecedented and disproportionate influence on public policy. To take but one example, women’s right to choose in the matter of abortion and even birth control is in the hands of politicians many of whose constituents engage in speaking in tongues and snake handling. So announcing that you are a radical theologian, proclaiming that “God is dead,” is not a good way to launch a political campaign in the United States. Here there is a divide, not only between red states and blue states but also between urban and rural, educated and uneducated, multicultural and provincial, which in turn prescribes how to draw the lines between secular and religious. Europe, by contrast, is a different story. As French and Taylor say, the great churches and cathedrals of Europe are filled—by tourists, not the faithful, who stroll about looking at an antiquity, something from a bygone world, something effectively dead. In the United States, we are turning many of the mainline churches in the cities into restaurants—while the evangelical assemblies in rural America are jammed to capacity. In other words, in terms of the sociology of religion, about half of the United States, the educated half, looks like western Europe, the culture of cultured despisers, of the old Enlightenment, and the other half looks like I don’t know what, like Europe in the sixteenth century. What sort of future could religion have in that scenario? Or better, what sort of future does it deserve? I am not the least bit convinced that it is necessary to somehow revive, resuscitate might be the better word, religion in Europe or the United States. It may well be time to move on, to pass the torch to the artists, scientists, public intellectuals, and activists of the NATO countries. But then the task at which religion will have failed will be no less daunting for the so-called secular culture, which will have its hands full. What task is that? To keep alive the idea of faith deeper than belief, of hope against hope, of a love that surpasses understanding. To affirm the possibility of the impossible, to sustain openness to the future, the coming of what we cannot see coming. To embrace the evangelical vision of a life of mercy and forgiveness, hospitality and compassion. In short, to effect a new Enlightenment, one that is enlightened about the limits of the old one. This formidable challenge will fall upon both humanities and the sciences, upon public and private institutions, upon every segment of the culture, but without religion. In a “religion without religion,” the possibility of the impossible will have to be protected from both

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the belief of the supernaturalists and the disbelief of the cultured despisers. What I can imagine is the gradual withering away of religion in the traditional sense, a shrinking down to the most reactionary corners of the culture, and a reinvention or “repetition” of religious discourses of the sort we see in Derrida’s “Circumfession,” where someone “who rightly passes for an atheist” assumes the posture and the place of Augustine making a public confession to his God and rewrites this book, instead of attacking Augustine’s “religiosity.” I can imagine reaching a point where it is commonplace to recognize that religion is an exercise of our symbolic imagination and is not in the business of proposing propositional truths about the origin of the human race or the destiny of the universe—all the while recognizing that the symbolic imagination is nonetheless profoundly important. Radical theology is in fact cut to fit a task like that. In radical theology, we are willing to say that God is a “product of our imagination,” where that is not said as a way to put it down. So is “Antigone” and “Hamlet” and, if we take Einstein at his word, his main contribution was to imagine what it would be like to hitch a ride on a particle of light. If you understand what the imagination is, you will never say merely a product of our imagination. The name of “God” is a creative expression of our apophatic imagination, a way we—we who have inherited an Abrahamic vocabulary—give word and figure to the mystery which we are. That the word “God” is on to something, if not a Big Guy in the Sky, to something of import, shows up in the proliferation of “spiritual but not religious” movements looking for an alternative to the currently bankrupt state of religion, or in songs in the popular culture like those of Leonard Cohen which cut, circum-cut, to the heart of the matter. This religion is also identified, as French and Taylor say, in a memorable expression in Kristeva’s “incredible (sic!) need to believe,” from credere, where belief is unbelievably important, which in her vocabulary is called the “semiotic,” which breaks out in language and the arts, in the symbolic order. If we are going to do this without religion in the traditional sense, what is necessary, on my account, is to avoid not only the supernaturalism of religion, which is the purpose served by the old Enlightenment, but also the transcendentalism of rationality, the reductionistic tendency of reason to reduce religion to “nothing more than” some version of a pathology, which is the “last master narrative.” This would be the task of the new Enlightenment. Were we able to undertake this double epochē, we could then revisit religious narratives and take them for what they are, moving narratives about the human condition. Then these stories would be restored to their proper place, enjoyed in their proper theopoetic status, as theopoems, touching tales of mercy and compassion, of the great battle waged with the “powers and principalities,” of dreams about the Year of Jubilee. That is only possible if they are deprived of their power to blackmail, of purporting to have divine authority, no longer

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made to serve as proof-texts for canonical intimidation, and no longer dismissed as hocus-pocus. Then the sole task that remains, for both the religious and the secular reader, is to read them—without believing them supernaturalistically or disbelieving them naturalistically. Surely we can always enjoy a good story, especially if it is about us, trying to say something about the mystery which we are, about our cor inquietum. This is all the more possible, and even necessary in Europe, as French and Taylor point out, because these stories are still there, sitting at the roots of European culture, in old buildings, in the names of cities and streets, in the most commonplace expressions. They are there but not there, there but forgotten, there but not really forgotten. Like a remnant, French and Taylor say so beautifully, of “our desires, our longings, all we have wondered about and searched for.” Like a ghost. Old Europe is haunted by this ghost. The ghost is a figure of something that is neither there nor not there, not real but not really able to be dismissed, dead but come back from the dead because it left its business in life unfinished. A new Enlightenment would not exorcize these ghosts but conjure them up, engage them in conversation, and hear what they have to say. These ancient figurations narrate the spectrality of our lives, like shapeshifting figures and spooky voices whispering in our ears, “you know it, but you will not say it,” as Zarathustra’s dwarf said. Know what? That you really need to believe, to have a faith beyond belief, a hope against hope, but you are afraid to say it for fear of sounding like you believe in ghosts. I believe in ghosts, these ghosts, and you can call me what you want.1 It is spooky business that we are about, this life of ours, flitting tremulously between presence and absence, life and death, there and not there, conjuring up memories of a past that was never present, promises of a future we cannot see coming. Memories and promises of what? If I knew that, Derrida would say, I would know everything. NOTE 1. See John D. Caputo, Specters of God: Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Specters of God: Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022.

Part III

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY

Chapter 7

The Call and the Cross in Caputo and Bultmann Rick Benjamins

As the purpose of the present volume is to trace the reception of Caputo in Europe, it seems appropriate to start my contribution as a Dutch theologian with the designation of a few traditions in the Netherlands which accord with his project. In general, Caputo’s elaboration of a weak theology harmonizes well with various and even dissimilar developments in Dutch theology. First, his claim that the name of God harbors an event seems to align with the theology of the so-called Amsterdam School, whose dominant theme can be described as the presence or the coming of the Name. The Name refers to the Name of God, of whom nothing can be said in general or in the abstract, whose presence—as promised by the revelation of the Name in Ex. 3—is solely revealed in acts of justice and mercy as they are written down in Scripture.1 “Where does JHVH all of a sudden come from?” is a telling phrase from K. H. Miskotte, one of the theologians held in high esteem by the school.2 Apart from this, the liberal Church-minister Klaas Hendrikse aroused much debate by his statement not to believe in a God who exists, but in a God that happens.3 To a certain extent Hendrikse followed on the work of Harry Kuitert, who was famously and infamously known for his assertion that God is a product of the imagination and that all we can say about “up there” comes from “down here.”4 Even though the Amsterdam School and Hendrikse or Kuitert hardly have anything in common and are sharply opposed concerning the reality of God and God’s revelation, their language and their metaphors harmonize well with various phrases from Caputo’s theology, which offers a sophisticated underpinning of both the idea that what matters about God can occur to us in an unforeseen way beyond our control and the assertion that it is possible to believe in a God who does not exist. Moreover, and thirdly, Caputo’s theology can be recognized as deeply religious because of his accentuation of perhaps. He claims that we are “at the mercy of the events,” 155

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just like Calvinist theology accentuated that we are at the mercy of God’s hidden counsel.5 Of course, events and a hidden counsel are miles apart, yet they accord by the assumption that things may happen for reasons that cannot possibly be known to us. In this respect, Caputo’s weak theology surprisingly touches on religious feelings from a very strong theology. Against this background my own interest in Caputo’s theology is related to the notion of the call. The Dutch theologian Gijs Dingemans, one of my teachers, wrote a book entitled The Voice of the One Who Calls, in which he combined a hermeneutic approach with some process-theological insights.6 The subject matter of the call also made me attentive to the German Anrede as a key term in the theologies of Rudolf Bultmann and Ingolf Dalferth among others. In relation to Dingemans, though, I became hesitant about the one behind the call and rather preferred to avoid the suggestion of an independent entity calling. At this point, Caputo’s theology proved very helpful. His notion of the call steers clear of supernatural or metaphysical troubles and offers the prospect of a call without determining someone who calls by strictly remaining under the call. Nevertheless, I encountered some difficulties with Caputo’s notion of the call as well. On these pages, I will first pursue his elaboration of the call in The Weakness of God and The Insistence of God, after which my difficulties will come to the fore in relation to his recent Cross and Cosmos and the theology of Rudolf Bultmann.

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE AND UNCONDITIONAL CALL OF THE EVENT In The Weakness of God Caputo argues that the name of God harbors an event, and that theology should distinguish the name from the elusive, ungraspable event.7 Henceforth, Caputo claims that God is not. God is neither a being, nor the ground of being, nor is God removed and safeguarded beyond being, but God is a name for the event that shakes and stirs being.8 To use the name of God means to relate oneself to the event which tears enclosed being open, for which we pray in the name of God. The meaning of God’s name, therefore, lies not in what it refers to but in what it evokes. This rather philosophical perspective is turned into a theology by the claim that “in the New Testament the event goes under the name ‘kingdom of God’.”9 This move allows Caputo to be more precise about the event, which takes the form of justice, forgiveness, gift, and hospitality as they are embodied by Jesus in the gospel. Where the kingdom occurs, events break the current situation by offering a gift beyond economical exchange, justice above the law or hospitality above ownership. Even though the occurrence of these events is extremely problematic, as Caputo explains in the wake of Derrida, the gospel

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tells us that they do happen, by means of which our world and our stance to it are deconstructed and opened up. This theology of the event should be considered as a weak theology, since God has no power to establish anything in the sphere of being. “I think of the world as addressed by a call, not produced by a cause . . . and of God as a call . . . not a sovereign power.”10 We are in the world, in the realm of being, in which we are solicited by God who calls us for something else and different, namely the kingdom. This call of God has no power, yet it has authority over us. To clarify the nature of this authority, Caputo refers to Derrida’s Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Derrida argued that the demand of justice deconstructs the law. In the name of justice, we criticize or crack the law for not producing justice but injustice. The demand of justice itself, in turn, is undeconstructible and should be recognized as absolute or unconditional, whence its authority over us. According to Caputo, the call of God or the event of the kingdom have the same powerless authority over us.11 Thus, we are called by an authority that makes us act but has no power itself. Caputo’s substitution of God for Derrida’s justice implies that he does not deconstruct the law in the name of justice, but God in the name of the event harbored in the name of God.12 Even though Caputo downplays this alteration as just a thought experiment and the entertainment of a rainy afternoon, I think this substitution has three major consequences.13 First, in this way deconstruction turns out not to be a hermeneutics of the death of God, as Mark C. Taylor claimed, but shows itself to be a hermeneutics of a desire for God. According to Taylor, after the loss of ultimate reality and final meaning represented by the death of God, nothing is left but to err in a landscape of meanings and references which continuously shift and change in varying contexts or networks. In contrast, Caputo opposes that we do not deconstruct because things have lost their fixed meaning but because of our desire for the event. We do not deconstruct because nothing stands firm any longer, but because we affirm the impossible and long for God.14 Secondly, in this way deconstruction is turned from an always critical, always unsettling, always stirring activity into a more positive, constructive, and affirmative operation. It is not just an attempt to break reality open under the pressure of the event, but—contrary to Derrida—it also asks whether reality could not give place to the event. It illustrates that Caputo does not just want to disarray reality, but is focused on a better version of it, namely one in which we respond to the call of the event. “Could there not be a kingdom reigned over, not by the rule of the law, but by the gratuity of grace . . . of what Derrida calls ‘the event’”?15 Implicitly, Caputo thereby shifts the attention from the event and the call to the world which has to comply to the call. The world needs a deconstruction in order to make place for the kingdom to happen in what happens. Thirdly, in order for the world to comply with

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the call of the event, our desire has to be addressed, and this makes our desire a supplement to the call. In fact, the event, the call, and our desire are very closely interwoven in Caputo’s weak theology in that they presuppose each other without being reduced to each other. The call proceeds from the event, but the event neither exists nor has a place to appear except for the call. The event insists in the call. The call, in turn, only takes shape if it is received and articulated by us and thus depends on our expression, which is based on our hope and desire for the event. Admittedly, Caputo is careful not to make the call of the event a projection of our desire. We do not give words to what we desire, but we express what desires us. Our desire for the event, therefore, is a desire beyond desire in which God desires us.16 But still, our desire—even though it is conditioned by the call—is a necessary supplement to the call. As a result, Caputo can tell that the name of God is the name of an event, but this event seems to be “the event of our faith in the transformability of things, in the most improbable and impossible things, so that life is never closed in, the future never closed off, the horizon never finite and confining.”17 In sum, the event, the call, and our desire are interwoven to such an extent that the event seems to be identical with the call, which gets shaped by our desire (beyond desire). This raises the question whether the theology of the event really is about the event or about our faith, but at this point I only want to underline that Caputo’s emphasis on the event and the call comply with our desire for something beyond the present situation and stem from this utter engagement with a different reality, which turns deconstruction into an affirmation and makes his weak theology a passionate theology for change.

A CALL OF THE WORLD WHICH IS BOUND TO END In The Insistence of God Caputo clarifies his position and seems to distance himself from a theology of hope and utopias. He now seems to accentuate the difficulties, impossibilities, and dangers of the event we hope for. First of all, The Insistence of God looks like a major disclaimer not to mistake the insistence of God for God’s existence. God does not exist. Neither does God act. The call is a call in the name of God or in the middle voice, as Caputo explains, and this means that the call comes from the world as a promise of the world.18 Yet, reality never fulfills the promise, since “existence can never catch up to what insists.”19 Caputo elucidates this discrepancy by using Derrida’s example of democracy. Democracy may have been partially realized in present institutions, but it is still a promise since no existing democracy fulfills the promise of democracy. “No conditioned, existing entity is ever equal to the demands of the unconditional.”20 Reality never catches up

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to the promise or the call and cannot actually contain the event that incites us to respond to the promise of the world. Secondly, the promise of the world prompts a “perhaps.” Perhaps we can realize democracy or justice or hospitality, or perhaps there is still a chance to realize more of what is promised by the world. “Perhaps” turns out to be a crucial term in The Insistence of God. It defies all foundations, unsettles every order, and makes our certainties uncertain. It thereby has the positive effect of making everything possible as it unties us from our fixed convictions and makes us sensitive to the possibilities of another world. But at the same time “perhaps” makes everything insecure. It makes our responses to the call permanently and systematically ambivalent, ambiguous, and dangerous. We respond to the call for more justice, for a better life or more life, but we can never be sure whether we actually will make life better and really establish a better justice. Because of perhaps it is inherently dangerous to respond to the call, as we take the risk to disrupt and disturb the present in view of an unforeseeable future. We might make things worse, perhaps, and in search for a better justice we might stimulate acts of violence, never knowing whether we open ourselves up to angels or demons. We may either invite the good Lord or the devil himself to come in when we open ourselves up to the incoming event. Thirdly, this turns religion (and a religion without religion) into an inherently risky business. Religious people are willing to take the risk of creating ruins because of their drive for a better world in response to the call. If I am correct, this means that Calvin’s Geneva, the Anabaptist’s Münster, Stalin’s Russia, the jihadi’s Raqqa, and so many more places are all responses to a call gone wrong in various degrees. We hope for the best and act upon it, but we may end with a catastrophe. There is no escape from this risk. In large parts of The Insistence of God Caputo clarifies his theology in a discussion with various philosophers. First of all, he argues that a confessional theology conceptualizes mythology, whereas he proposes a radical theology, even though he admits the dependence of a radical theology on confessional theologies. In radical theology the concepts of theology are considered as representations or Hegelian Vorstellungen which—contrary to Hegel—cannot be sublated or converted into concepts. Representations do not cover notions or concepts, but in these representations events are going on, so that events replace Geist. Events incite us to respond to the promise of the world and to risk the dangers of perhaps. According to Quentin Meillassoux, this amounts to a mere subjective response to reality, which neglects science and the objective, materialist truth that humans are part of a universe which is bound to fade out. Caputo responds to this objection that Meillassoux apparently supposes an objective reality versus us as subjects. He argues, by contrast, that our subjectivity is not

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opposed to reality, but forms an important part of it. By eliminating our reactions to reality, we do not get a clearer picture of it, but rather reduce it. Caputo sees himself as a Hegelian postmodernist, who does not suppose anything beyond the world but takes reality to include both “reality” and our reactions to it. He criticizes a Kantian type of postmodernism, which claims that reality ultimately cannot be known and thereby provides itself with a safe space for its own perspective isolated from science. As a consequence of his Hegelian postmodernism, though, Caputo has to admit that there will be an end to our world, according to our present knowledge, as Meillassoux said. The call of God or the event is a call of the world that cannot be excluded from reality. But science tells us that the world will end in entropic disintegration. Now it seems to me that Caputo puts an enormous pressure on his own theology by claiming that the event is always “to come,” in tune with Derrida, while at the same time accepting with Meillassoux that the universe is bound to disintegrate and to come to an end. What is there to come if there is nothing left anymore? And how can the call be unconditional if it depends on the world and will end with the world? The result will be a mortal God. In Cross and Cosmos Caputo elaborates on a mortal God. The cross is a symbol of finite life and its death, both the life of each individual and the life of the cosmos. There is no masterplan which turns the defeat of the cross into a victory, nor a divine strategy which deals with the cross as a move in a winning game. There is no glory beyond the cross, no victory after the cross, but only a difficult glory in the defeat of the cross. In order to substantiate this point of view, Caputo takes side with Luther’s Deus absconditus revelatus sub contrario, while radicalizing Luther by claiming that instead of an identifiable God, there is nothing but hiddenness and mere absconditum behind the revelation of the cross. He thereby abandons the idea of a reconciliation either by way of the Christus Victor or in a Hegelian way. There is no reconciliation needed as a remedy for our sins. Death is not a punishment, nor a trial, nor a loss for which we deserve compensation in the afterlife, since “the carnal is mortal but it is not corrupt or fallen and in need of an immortal remedy.”21 On the contrary, according to Caputo, the cross offers a far more difficult reconciliation of incorporating death into life. Reconciliation basically is the acceptance of finite existence and death, which “releases life in all its fragile glory.” Reconciliation, therefore, “is a source of hope, not despondency, and if it does not go gently, it does go gratefully into that dark night for having had the grace of life.”22

UNCONDITIONAL OR WITHOUT WHY? The cosmos is bound to end, but yet, there is a call of the world, which is the call of an event, a call of the unconditional and undeconstructible, as long as

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the world continues to exist. Let me explain that I am still with Caputo here. I do appreciate his persistence that there is more to reality than just objectivity opposed to us as subjects, because reality speaks to us, calls us, carries us, and kicks us and we are reality ourselves. I also appreciate his fierce honesty in accepting the fact of finite life, personally and cosmic. I just think he put his own theology under an enormous pressure here, by both claiming a promise and a call of the world and arguing that the world will never make its own promise come true. Even worse, the world and the call are bound to end. What then is left of the aforementioned “event of our faith in the transformability of things, in the most improbable and impossible things, so that life is never closed in, the future never closed off, the horizon never finite and confining” if the end of the world makes our horizon finite and confining?23 In the final chapter of The Insistence of God Caputo seems to find his way out by what is labeled a “nihilism of grace.” This nihilism of grace seems to be synonymous with the difficult glory of Cross and Cosmos. We live a life which is bound to end in death, yet the glory of this world is exactly thereby revealed in its purposelessness, its finitude and contingency, existing for nothing, opening us up to a life without why, in tune with Heidegger. But to my mind, the nihilism of grace and the difficult glory of life do not fit well with the event to come from The Weakness of God. It seems to me that Caputo is making a move back from Derrida’s event to Heidegger’s being without why. “My entire idea is to reclaim religion as an event of the world,” Caputo asserts, but now he no longer takes the event as something that stirs being, but he rather looks at the world in its contingency without why as itself the event.24 To put it sharply, the question is whether we have to respond to a call in order to open ourselves up to the event coming and happening in what happens (which seems to be the Derridean line of thought favored by Caputo, which provides us with a future-oriented perspective crossed out by the final end of the universe), or that we have to undo our calls and our vocations—as Agamben, for instance, advised us to do—in order to restore being to its possibilities and live without why (which seems to be the Heideggerian line of thought supported by Caputo, which provides us with an openness to the facticity of being but crosses out the future-oriented perspective). It seems to me that these different perspectives are reflected in the various meanings Caputo attributes to the cross. On the one hand, he claims that Jesus was killed, but his witness and promise did not die.25 In this respect, the cross affirms that the call of the kingdom—of justice, forgiveness, hospitality—is undeconstructable and calls upon us. “It is up to us to make these songs [about reconciliation and the new creation] come true, to fill up what is lacking in the body of these songs and translate them into actual existence. That burden, that responsibility, is our cross.”26 On the other hand, the cross leads to an

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unconditional affirmation of the gift of life without why, extracted from every economy. “Reconciliation requires an unconditional affirmation—without being coerced by the promise of a reward and the threat of punishment, without compromise, without a hidden strategy—of what the thing itself is, which includes what it is not, affirming its limits.”27 Caputo puts these meanings on the same page, but I fail to see the inner connection between the two. If the cross summons us to justice, there is a why, an ultimate reason for us to live and to act and to die for. If the cross proclaims the grace of a life without why, there is just a tragic beauty of life to enjoy and to share. Of course, the gratuitous grace of life can be shared with others—the lame, the blind, and the dispossessed—but without a why and an ultimate reason in the form of a holy obligation. To make myself clear, I am sympathetic to both the meanings of the cross Caputo puts forward, but they do seem different meanings to me. To put it in a Lutheran vocabulary, are we bound under the law of the call and the event to come, or are we set free under the grace of a life and a mercy without why?

BULTMANN’S CREDIT In order to discuss the call in Caputo’s theology further, I would like to bring in some points from the perspective of the theology of Rudolf Bultmann. Caputo mentions him in Cross and Cosmos without dealing with his theology extensively, but it seems to me that a discussion of Bultmann might clarify the difficulties and the options of a theology centered around the call and the event. I will not enter into a detailed rendition of Bultmann but confine myself to three issues which concern me without necessarily agreeing with one or the other. First, in Cross and Cosmos Caputo explains that the difference between him and Bultmann is related to the identification of the call and the event with Jesus as God’s revelation to humanity. Caputo holds that the identifying feature of the call as such is that it is “precisely unidentifiable, ultimately unnamable and anonymous, that it is precisely impossible to call out the caller of the call.”28 By identifying the event and the caller Bultmann has “not quite managed to lift himself off the ground of myth.”29 If the caller were identified, Caputo claims several times, it would be the end of the call. In The Folly of God, for example, he argues that “we would get out of the accusative into the nominative” as soon as we identify the call, since this would make it our idea and our call, which would undermine our being called.30 But it seems to me that Bultmann mostly agrees with Caputo here and likewise tries to keep us in the accusative without identifying God. Bultmann argues that we cannot speak about God objectively. We cannot conclude God from worldly affairs,

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nor talk about God metaphysically or as a principle for the explanation of the world.31 God makes Godself known to us in miracles, which are ordinary occurrences seen in faith as acts of God, without the possibility to establish a direct identity between the two. Principally, the sole and only miracle is that we can understand ordinary occurrences in faith as acts of God whereby God breaks and interrupts both the calculable, foreseeable course of affairs and our improper stance to them if we try to manage and care for our lives ourselves.32 If God makes Godself known to us, Bultmann explains, we know nothing more about God than we knew before, but we learn to live differently and talk out of God of whom we cannot speak in an objectifying manner. Knowledge of God is knowledge of ourselves as addressed by God and the reality of God is only present to us in the way God acts upon us by addressing us.33 As I see it, the way Bultmann talks about God is quite similar to the way Caputo talks about the event. There is something more to the occurrence of the world than just the occurrence, since it may encompass either an address of God or contain an event happening in what happens. Caputo is right to note that there is an identification in Bultmann and he is also right that Bultmann sticks to the myth, which he wants to demythologize and to understand existentially. But it seems to me that Bultmann’s concern is not so much to identify God or the word of God by means of cross and kerygma for the sake of identifying God, but the other way round, namely to accept and receive the word of the cross as a word of God addressed to us. Of course, an identification takes place this way, but this does not place us in the nominative as the ones who identify God but keep us precisely in the accusative as the ones who are addressed by God. We might abstain from this identification, but in that case the counter-question will be whether we do not escape from the accusative. It is precisely by identifying the word of the cross as a word of God spoken to us that we are put in the accusative and recognize to be addressed. The reference to an unidentifiable event as such may only lead us to mere abstraction and speculation which makes us lose the existential impact of the address dressed in mythology. Opposed to Bultmann, Caputo claims that the call is never identical with the call in this or that tradition, and that the call “if there is such a thing” is never self-identical.34 I could agree with that, but keep thinking that the most important thing of the call is to be called, that is, to be actually addressed in some identifiable form. If so, Bultmann’s existential understanding still has some credit compared to Caputo’s deconstruction. Secondly, Caputo relates the unidentified call to a desire beyond desire opposed to a desire for this or that. A desire beyond desire “keeps the future open and subjects the past to ever-changing meanings. The watchword of deconstruction, its first, last and constant word, its constant prayer, is ‘come,’ viens, oui, oui.”35 This accentuation of desire, or a desire beyond desire, seems to find little or no resonance with Bultmann. Human beings may have

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a desire for a fulfilled life and care about their existence in various ways, but according to Bultmann this leads them to live in an improper or unauthentic, uneigentlich way. The reference to Heidegger is obvious here, of course. In Bultmann’s theology, the turn to an authentic or eigentlich way of existence beyond self-management and self-care is marked by the proclamation of the cross, which makes us crucified with Christ.36 This crucifixion means that I am set free of myself and the possibilities for existence provided to me by this world. Through the crucifixion believers give up their connection to this world, accept their finitude, and no longer try to realize themselves within the worldly domain since the word of the cross has judged that domain and released or liberated the believers from the world. This world is brought to an end by the cross of Christ, who frees the believers from fear and opens them up to love, which allows them to focus no longer on self-management and self-care, but to live a new life out of grace. The difference between Bultmann and Caputo concerning desire is clearly related to their opposed notions of sin and estrangement. To Caputo, desire seems to be the important thing for human beings—which is illustrated by the interrelatedness of the event, the call, and our desire as explained above—and there is no real account of sin, repentance, or conversion. Although Caputo does not want us to follow our own desire, whence he speaks of a desire beyond desire, he does not think that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. As quoted above, “the carnal is mortal but it is not corrupt or fallen and in need of an immortal remedy.”37 Neither would Bultmann say that we need an immortal remedy, but he does claim that we are corrupt and fallen in that we live an unauthentic life. The cross is a judgment and a liberation from this inauthenticity. To Caputo, the cross confirms the unconditional and undeconstructible call of the event which goes under the name of the kingdom of God for which we have a desire, but to Bultmann it is a judgment of our inauthenticity which opens the way to live in the kingdom. This turns the cross, or rather the proclamation of the cross heard in faith, into an event that actually changes our lives, desires, and expectations. The difference concerning desire and estrangement leads to a further difference, which is my third issue. According to Bultmann, the person who is judged by the word of the cross is liberated from the domain of the world and lives a new, eschatological life, which is neither characterized by hope for the world nor by expectations in the world, since the event has already happened in the word of the cross. To hope for something in this world after the event of the cross would imply a relapse into the worldly realm and a denial of the eschatological existence. The core of this eschatological existence lies in our distance from the world. Because the old world has been ended by Christ, the believers live in the world as if they did not live there and possess the worldly things as if they did not have them (1 Cor.

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7:29–31). Precisely in this distance from the world the renewal manifests itself.38 As a result, the future entropic disintegration of this world would not mean much to Bultmann, as it is merely an affair of this world from which the believer is already liberated. Neither would he hope for some event to come, since the event has already happened. This does not mean that the believer is indifferent to the world. The believer is now free to live and to act out of love and to respond in an authentic way to whatever situation may occur. In my opinion, the aforementioned tension in Caputo’s theology between a Derridean “to come” and a Heideggerian life “without why” is solved in Bultmann’s so-called eschatological life. This is a life of grace which opens us up to love by means of the word of the cross that puts an end to this world. It seems to me that Bultmann’s eschatological life, just like his theology as a whole, is not entirely alien to Caputo. Yet, it is also clear to me that Caputo does not want to go along with him completely, because it implies the identification of the event with the word of the cross and because Bultmann still presupposes someone who calls, even though he does not seem to identify the caller beyond the call heard in faith. As for me, I do not necessarily think that the call has to be identified with the word of the cross or the kerygma, as Bultmann takes it. Reality can speak to us in many ways and call upon us or address and uplift us with a great variety of instances. It is not for me to decide beforehand what it is that calls me, but to respond to it when it does. Yet, I do think that the call has to take some concrete form in order to let me actually respond to it. When Caputo says that events are going on in what happens, he admittedly affirms that events are related to occurrences. Yet, he denies that an occurrence can be identified as an event. In the event we are directed to what is not, is always to come, and is never simply there. Therefore we cannot identify the event with an occurrence. This makes sense to me, but in my view, we are touched and called and sometimes gifted by reality in a far more tangible and specific way, to such an extent that occurrences can be identified as events. The event as such is a construction (a heterodox Hegelian one, perhaps, or a Kantian noumenon instead) and its essence may be that it is unidentifiable, unnameable, and anonymous, but as such, I would say, it never speaks to us. I doubt the importance of events as such, but rather think that occurrences are turned into events if we let ourselves be addressed by them, are called by them and respond to them.39 The response matters and constitutes the event. Just as there is no response in the abstract, there is not much interest in events in the abstract. They surely may come, oui, oui, but do they matter, that is, materialize in our responses? In this respect my own attitude is probably more existential than deconstructive, which makes me as sympathetic to Bultmann as to Caputo, albeit with a difference to both.

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CONCLUSION In my opinion, Caputo’s weak theology makes an important contribution to the question whether the old and worn word “God” can still be meaningful today. God can be conceived of as something that stirs being—does not determine it, is not responsible for it—and calls upon us. In my perspective, it is especially the accentuation of the call as a call of the world, without the presupposition of someone calling behind the call, which makes Caputo’s theology valuable. In my view, this theology can be very helpful to the various developments in the Netherlands mentioned above. Somehow, they all struggle for a theology after theism in what we now call a post-secular context. In this context, Caputo turns out to be a most helpful conversation partner, who may provoke our disagreement on one point or another, but precisely thereby calls for a frank positioning in clear and plain terms.40

NOTES 1. Frans Breukelman is held to be the founder of the school, whose work is only partially available in English, see Frans H. Breukelman, ed. Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer, The Structure of Sacred Doctrine in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 2. K.H. Miskotte, Als de goden zwijgen, Verzameld werk deel 8 (Kampen: Kok, 1983, [1956]), 153. See also K.H. Miskotte, Biblical ABCs: The Basics of Christian Resistance, trans. Eleonora Hof and Collin Cornell (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, [1941]). 3. Klaas Hendrikse, Geloven in een God die niet bestaat: manifest van een atheïstische dominee (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2007). 4. H.M. Kuitert, Het algemeen betwijfeld christelijk geloof: Een herziening (Baarn: Ten Have, 1992), 23. 5. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 16. 6. G.D.J. Dingemans, De stem van de Roepende: Pneumatheologie (Kampen: Kok, 2000). 7. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2. 8. Caputo, Weakness of God, 5. 9. Caputo, Weakness of God, 13, cf. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016), 107. 10. Caputo, Weakness of God, 39. 11. Caputo, Weakness of God, 6. 12. Caputo, Weakness of God, 27–29, cf. Caputo, Insistence of God, 9. 13. Caputo, Weakness of God, 29.

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14. Caputo, Weakness of God, 290–291. 15. Caputo, Weakness of God, 30. 16. Caputo, Weakness of God, 36, 122, cf. Caputo, Insistence of God, 82–86. 17. Caputo, Weakness of God, 88. 18. Caputo, Insistence of God, 31, 52. 19. Caputo, Insistence of God, 6. 20. Caputo, Folly of God, 84. 21. John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 260. 22. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 260. 23. See footnote 17. 24. Caputo, Insistence of God, 247. 25. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 64, 65, 153. 26. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 121 27. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 250. 28. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 37. 29. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 37. 30. Caputo, Folly of God, 91. 31. See R. Bultmann, “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden?” in Glauben und Verstehen I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1933), 26–37. 32. See R. Bultmann, “Zur Frage des Wunders,” in Glauben und Verstehen I, 214–228. 33. See R. Bultmann, “Welchen Sinn hat es.” 34. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 38. 35. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 38. 36. See R. Bultmann, Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung (München: Kaiser, 1985, original 1941), 55–57. 37. See footnote 21. 38. See especially Rudolf Bultmann, Neues Testament und Mythologie, 95–98. The text from 1 Cor. 7: 29–31 was of ultimate importance to Bultmann throughout his career, even before his acquaintance with Heidegger, cf. Konrad Hamman, Rudolf Bultmann: Eine Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). Occasionally, Caputo refers to the “as if not” and relates it to Heidegger without mentioning Bultmann and interpreting the “as if not” in the context of “perhaps” quite different from Bultmann, cf. Caputo, The Insistence, 78–80. 39. In this respect, I would agree with Bultmann’s dictum, following Wilhelm Herrmann, that one can only say of God what he does to us. Likewise, I would say that the event only matters if it occurs to us. 40. Cf. Pieter J. Huiser and Rick Benjamins, “Caputo’s notion of insistence as an instance of existence,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 63, no. 3 (2021): 299–315. Huiser reflects on the importance of Caputo’s theology in the Dutch context and suggests that insistence is a form of existence in a relational epistemology and ontology.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Breukelman, Frans H. The Structure of Sacred Doctrine in Calvin’s Theology, edited by Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Bultmann, R. “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden?” In Glauben und Verstehen I, 26–37. Tübingen: Mohr, 1933. Bultmann, R. “Zur Frage des Wunders.” In Glauben und Verstehen I, 214–228. Tübingen: Mohr, 1933. Bultmann, R. Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung. München: Kaiser, 1985 [1941]. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Dingemans, G. D. J. De stem van de Roepende: Pneumatheologie. Kampen: Kok, 2000. Hamman, Konrad. Rudolf Bultmann: Eine Biographie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Hendrikse, Klaas. Geloven in een God die niet bestaat: Manifest van een atheïstische dominee. Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2007. Huiser, Pieter J., and Rick Benjamins. “Caputo’s Notion of Insistence as an Instance of Existence.” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und ­Religionsphilosophie 63: 3 (2021): 299–315. Kuitert, H. M. Het algemeen betwijfeld christelijk geloof: Een herziening. Baarn: Ten Have, 1992. Miskotte, K. H. Als de goden zwijgen. Verzameld werk deel 8. Kampen: Kok, 1983 [1956]. Miskotte, K. H. Biblical ABCs: The Basics of Christian Resistance. Translated by Eleonora Hof and Collin Cornell. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021 [1941].

Response to Benjamins John D. Caputo

I am very grateful to Rick Benjamins for what I consider to be a very careful reading and for pointing out the links of my work with the Dutch literature. He has quite successfully tracked down my argument. I am grateful that he has kept on reading, past The Weakness of God all the way up to Cross and Cosmos. Reading accounts of one’s own work is like being a witness on the stand. “Now, Mr. Caputo,” the prosecutor begins, “you said this.” “Yes, I did.” But I am squirming in my seat. I am worrying I will regret this confession, how it will come back to haunt me and be my undoing. So I laughed out loud when I got to the sentence, about midway, “Let me explain that I am still with Caputo here.” It relieved my anxiety. By the time I finished reading it, I decided my main problem will be to figure out not only where but whether there is any light between our two positions, whether it might be most a matter of different formulations. Let me begin with the notion of desire. Desire is, in the language of Lyotard and Agamben, to speak of the receiver side of the call rather than the sender side. It is the other half of the call (rather than a “supplement”). The call and the response are simply two different sides of the event. By desire in its most succinct formulation I mean the affirmation of the possibility of the impossible, of what lies beyond the horizon of possibility, of expectation. (On the sender side this is called the coming of what we cannot see coming.) I am just as happy to call desire, as I often do, faith, hope, love of the possibility of the impossible—what else is there to love? Sometimes I simply speak of the cor inquietum as it is reperformed, reformatted by Derrida in “Circumfession.” Our desire is our restless heart, which is always saying, come, come, yes, and always asking, “What do I love when I love my God?” Like Derrida, that is the question I too have spent my whole life asking. If I knew the answer, I would know everything. So it should be clear that when I speak 169

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like this it has nothing to do with dreaming of self-management, autarky, the liberal individual. Indeed, the call, the event, draws me outside of myself. In Tillich’s terms, my desire is not a matter of autonomy but of theonomy; in Derrida’s terms, it is the desire of the other in me, the decision of the other in me, which he calls “God as the other name of desire.”1 Benjamins poses a challenge to the compatibility of the notion of the event as always already to-come, à-venir, and my invocation of the widespread view of contemporary physicists at present—this could change, of course—that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate of acceleration into oblivion. The “promise of the world” will never come true. So where’s the future in that? “What,” he asks, “is there to come if there is nothing left anymore? And how can the call be unconditional if it depends on the world and will end with the world?” To which he rightly responds, “a mortal God.” This leads us to the notion of the “nihilism of grace” which, as Benjamins points out, corresponds to the “difficult glory,” which is to say that earthly life, or better cosmic life, is to be treasured for itself, “without why,” not for its exchange value as a ticket to an after-life. But Benjamins thinks the eventfilled life faces an intolerable fate (cosmic oblivion) and the living “without why” must give up its “future-oriented” perspective. But I think the open-endedness of the event is not contradicted by its finitude. Life (which is neg-entropic, resistant to entropy) is open-ended until life ends. Death (personal, planetary, stellar, cosmic) is the end of openendedness; the impossibility of possibility. To say the event is open-ended is not to say it lives forever. It is just to say, as Derrida repeatedly says, that life will always have been too brief, and that it makes no sense to speak of being “reconciled to death” if that means giving up our hope in life. Life, as long as life lives, is openness to the future. The moment I give up my openness to the future I am as good as dead. That is why I always cite Augustine’s cor inquietum but I do not cite the rest of the sentence, donec requiescat in te. There is no rest; requiescence is for the grave, requiescat in pace! Open-endedness and everlastingness are two different things. Furthermore, not only is living “without why” possible if life is finite; it is only possible, for only then is it kept safe from the economy of exchange. Without why does not mean to shut down the call, it means that the response to the call is made without conditions, because the call calls, not because “there is a future in it” but because the call calls to keep the future open—until it does not. Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. The difficult glory is that the glory is not a reward for the difficulty but embedded in it; resurrection is embedded in the cross. I have shifted the name of God out of the ontological order, of the being of the Supreme Being and the ground of being, to the axiological order, not simply being but being’s worth, not living forever but living well, living worthily, making ourselves worthy of the events that happen to us, in a world

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which God (adopting the axiological standpoint) called good several times over. In the end, the name of God belongs to the grammar of love, the axiology of love, and love, as the mystics say, is “without why.” The ontology yields to an axiology, and the axiology culminates in a doxology. Glory be to the world, whatever it was in the beginning, however it will be in the end, world without why, Amen, Alleluia. I have always thought of Bultmann, along with Bonhoeffer and Tillich, as the theological vanguard of my youth when I was coming to grips with the Council of Trent Catholicism in which I was raised, and I am happy to be located on his side. If Bultmann and Benjamins are agreed that the cross is a symbol of a particular form of life, and that there are as many such symbols as there are forms of life, then that is what I am saying. I think, as Tillich suggests, that the cross is also a meta-symbol, the symbol of the symbol, that is, it crucifies or crosses out the attempt of any symbol to confuse itself with the unconditional itself. Eschatological life takes place in theopoetic space, where the Christ has put an end to the old world. Back here in the world of space and time, the old world remains firmly in place, and if anything, its grip is getting stronger. We are dreaming of eschatological life; that is what we love and desire, but back here, two thousand years and counting, this event which has already come is still to come. As to the event itself, I think that Benjamins and I are on the same side. The “weak theology” of The Weakness of God is a Christian-specific theology of the event, whereas the expression “radical theology” allows that there could be as many theologies of the event as there are historical cultural communities. I share Benjamins’s worry over talking of the call “as such.” Just a few sentences after the sentence he cites I say, “the one thing we do know about the ‘event’ is that there is no such thing as the event, the call.”2 Without doing a word search, my guess is that any time I spoke of the “event itself” I usually added “s’il y en a,” if there is any such thing—which there is not. Events are not trans-cultural universals. They are the disseminative effects of concrete historical cultures, spin-offs, and sparks thrown off by already constituted sedimented cultural elements in which we catch sight of the possible, of the possibility of the impossible. Radical theology is always the radicalization of something, of an existing historical tradition. That is why I call it, following Derrida, a parasite, or a para-logue. The call as such, the transcendental structure of the pure call, is a conceptual construction found only in an academic seminar or a panel at the AAR. No one has ever responded to “the pure call.” That would be a neurosis: feeling an urgent need to do something but having no idea what to do. Christians respond to the call that is embedded in the cross, which requires interpretation, which requires radical hermeneutics, a.k.a. radical theology, as Enrieke Damen shows. That is why I say that radical theology does not exist.

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It insists. It calls, de profundis. From out of the depths of what? Of the only theologies that exist, which are the theologies of the existing historical communities. The Weakness of God is not proposing a new religion—God knows we already have enough of them—a new rival to Christianity. It is proposing a radicalization of Christianity, a way of being Christian, a way of following the Way, without being held captive to the delusions it entertains of enjoying supernatural credentials. So, we can identify the call taking place within the various historical communities, but we never identify the call with any particular community. We can name the call, but there can never be a proper name, a master name for the call that escapes the endless chain of substitutions and translations. The hos me sayings mean we must live in any given form of life as if not; we must preserve a certain distance from this form of life (belief, croyance) and not absolutize it, not identify it with faith (foi) itself in the event.3 The revealed God is a form of life. The hidden God is hidden. Benjamins worries that the primacy of the futural does injury to the present. On the contrary—see my analysis of “quotidianism”4—in being-toward the “to-come” (Zukunft, à-venir) we embrace our mortality. Paul was mistaken to say that death is an enemy to be conquered. Death is simply a limit, part of the play of life/death, and what is to be conquered is unjust or avoidable death. The mortality of the moment, always-already implicitly in view, makes this moment precious. The mystical rose is an abyss, without why, without a reason beyond or outside itself. It does not enter into the eternal now of the Neoplatonic metaphysics saturating medieval mysticism. It blossoms for the while that it blossoms, until it does not. It embraces the fragility, temporality and mortality of the world, of the world-to-come—come what may, win or lose. Benjamins is right that I keep a safe distance from mythological language like “fall” and “sin.” I do not consider death a punishment for anything, or the result of “sin” or a mythological “fall,” which Benjamins following Bultmann still accepts. On the contrary, as I read Genesis, Adam and Eve got their walking papers for wanting to avoid death, to live forever by eating of the tree of life. I would demythologize the entire tripartite schema of original purity / corruption-fall / redemption, which shows up in the economy of the Trinity as a creation / redemption / sanctification schema. There never was an original purity to lose. I replace this mythology with the ambiguous life, the undecidability, the dangerous perhaps, the promise/threat, the un-programmability of life, so that life beats an unsteady path between better and worse. The origin was never pure. It is as undecidable as anything subsequent. Undecidability, the possibility for good and evil (not or), as Schelling shows, is the condition of both our creativity and of the worst evils. The same event, the same love of the unconditional which stirs within the name (of) “God” explains both why it is the best way to save the world and the best way to burn it down.

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NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 80. 2. John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 37. 3. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 78–80. 4. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), Chapter 8.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Chapter 8

Caputo and the Unidentifiability of God Christophe Chalamet

The name of John D. Caputo is well known among philosophers of religion and theologians, all the more since his “coming out” not just as a philosopher of religion, but as a theologian more than a decade ago. Several of Caputo’s most significant monographs, since The Weakness of God (2006), have focused to a significant extent on the theme of “God,” and so there is no doubt that he is among the theo-logians of our day—not just that, for he is arguably one of the most provocative and passionate theologians of our day. I begin with some general questions toward John Caputo’s thought, before suggesting ways in which an incarnational theology may challenge his “weak” theology. A THEOLOGICAL STYLE OF HIS OWN Let us begin with the topic of style. Caputo’s rhetoric is immediately recognizable. One of his gifts as a thinker (something reminiscent of Terry Eagleton, but Caputo has his own touch) is his humor. One regularly chuckles while reading his works—something that cannot be said of the bulk of the theological writings that are being published these days. The chuckles, however, are sometimes overshadowed by mild annoyance, especially at the repetitions as well as the caricaturing he is fond of.1 Caputo seems to think he is fighting neo-Thomists and strict neo-Orthodox scholars: “Theology in the strong standard version belongs to the sovereign order of power and presence and favors a grammar of great omni-nouns and hyper-verbs. It strides confidently within the assured and strident categories of theism and atheism, belief and unbelief, existence and non-existence, . . . absolute and relative, true and false.”2 The problem is that, even if these types of theism appear to be on 175

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the rise again, notably among analytic theologians and philosophers of religion, “good” theology, wherever it is being done, usually steers clear of such repristinating efforts, or at least engages in critical analysis and constructive interpretation of older theological models. Is it really necessary to first present what looks like a series of caricatures of “orthodox” theology before proposing a different, “weak” theology? Why not aim at the better versions of contemporary Christian theology, rather than put up a straw man (e.g. the “palace theologians”) that serves as an all too convenient target of ridicule? Caputo’s critique of theology would become sharper and more insightful if he critically engaged the more rigorous and promising works in the field. THE CLAIM ON OURSELVES More importantly, Caputo aims to do theology coram Deo. This is no “spectator theology.” Theology is no game, for him, even if his prose is almost always playful (and often to a fault). “I am trying to expose, or to maintain our exposure, or to give a word to our inescapable exposure, to the insistent claim that is made upon us.”3 This is a genuinely crucial insight. To be human is indeed to live in the kind of “inescapable exposure” Caputo suggests. All of us often attempt to forget about it, as Blaise Pascal indicated long ago with his insights on “distraction,” and we do this rather successfully, but any serious reflection on what the word “God” may signify for us should indeed aim at maintaining or signaling this exposure which tells something decisive about who we are as human beings. What is presupposed and even affirmed here is that we do not come first. When we come into the picture, something else is already there, addressing a claim to us—whether we want it or not, whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not: “the name of God is the name of a call in which we are called upon to respond, which we may or may not do, whether or not we think there is anyone out there making such a call. The name of God is the name of a deed, of what is to be done, something that may or may not be done . . . something structually to-come where what happens rests upon our response and may end up being a disaster.”4 To exist as human beings is to be summoned “to respond.” This basic responsorial dimension of human existence is expressed here with great acuity. The question then arises of “who” is issuing the call. Let us examine this point, which of course is of the highest importance in any theo-logical project. THE CALLER WHO MAY OR MAY NOT BE TRUSTED Who is the “caller”? What is the caller’s “identity” or the caller’s “contours”? In answering these questions, Caputo is at his most apophatic and

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existentialist. In this theology of “perhaps,” God as the one who calls “may or may not be,” “may or may not be trusted.”5 Why is that? Because if trust is placed into something that is “completely trustworthy,” then it no longer is “trust” but a full assurance, “a surety.”6 Trust, in Caputo’s mind, can only be utterly vulnerable and shaky, otherwise we are on a straight path toward religious bigotry, fanaticism, and violence. It resembles not so much a light (even the small light of a candle, which is at once fragile and powerful, capable of illuminating a very large room) as the fleeting trail of smoke that rises up once the light has been extinguished. This is a very original interpretation of “trust.” Here trust is lacking any “confidence” (fiducia), it is characterized instead by complete ignorance and puzzlement. The human being who receives the “call” has absolutely no idea who may be calling. The one who is calling has no contours whatsoever. The call, and only the call, is what matters. Pretending to know, even fragmentarily and provisionally, the identity of the caller who calls would lead us back into the great temptation of “strong theology.” Since, as he sees it, “knowing God” can only lead to arrogance, idolatry, and violence, Caputo has decided that it must be an absolute impossibility. There can and must be no such thing. The caller must be “structurally inaccessible, unidentifiable.”7 This is one of the most distinct aspects of what we may cheekily call Caputo’s “doctrine of God.” But is this all or nothing approach the only way out of the conundrum and the only response to our hybris, to our desire to grasp God and the truth and in this way to secure ourselves and achieve power? This is not the place for an examination of “faith” as trust and confidence, but my sense is that Caputo’s “radical theology” misses the mark here—and not by a small margin. There is the possibility of a different course, as I see it, between the foolish pretense or claim to have “grasped” the truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, the kind of full-blown apophaticism that denies any knowledge, any identification, even provisionally and fragmentarily, of God. Christian theology should be searching for a way in between these two extremes. In the sending and giving of God’s word (not just λόγος, but ‫)ּדָ בַ ר‬, doesn’t God consent to become identifiable, so that we may come to know, fragmentarily and provisionally for sure, the contours of who God is, even if the truth of who God is remains inapproachable, never at our disposal?8 Doesn’t speaking of God entail speaking both of God’s unveiling and God’s hiddenness, not of one or the other? And where does the assumption that any robust or confident knowledge of God leads to arrogance and violence come from? Examples of the contrary abound, it seems to me. Caputo’s suspicion against anchored convictions deserves to be challenged, especially since the simultaneity of anchored convictions and radical questions (the “perhaps”) is possible—and, arguably, necessary.

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THE INSISTENCE OF THE CALLER I now turn to another of Caputo’s intriguing claims, namely on God’s “insistence,” the term that, as he sees it, should replace the notion of God’s “existence.” God “is not really and truly God without us,” “the insistence of God requires our existence and so depends on us. The divine life is incarnated in us, and God’s weakness requires that we do all the heavy lifting. God insists, while we exist.”9 The problem with this kind of God-talk is not that it is “heretic.” Caputo is not going to be interrogated any time soon by the partisans of “strong theology”—thank God! Heresies, nowadays, tend to have something to do with ethical questions: they concern theological topics mostly insofar as these topics are used to promote unjust, oppressive systems and sinful acts (see the World Council of Churches’ condemnations of certain South African Reformed churches in the 1970s, at the height of Apartheid). The problem is not heresy. The problem, rather, is that the human being becomes almost omnipotent here! The old attribute has been transferred from God to the human, who is now in charge of “all the heavy lifting”! The human finds himself once again in the position of Atlas. “God needs us to happen at all.”10 This is a problematic move, in my opinion—at least as p­ roblematic and dangerous as the old vision of a kind of divine omnipotent being e­ xercising a full-blown celestial dictatorship through perfect, total c­ ontrol over creation as a whole. Could it be that Caputo also senses a problem in his counterproposal, when he suggests that his views may be “too humanistic and anthropocentric?”11 Here too, it seems to me that Christian theology, avoiding either a transformation of humanity into Atlas or a denial of human responsibility, must look for a third way that articulates together, in a type of covenantal model, divine prerogatives, on the one hand, and human responsiveness and responsibility on the other. But Caputo does not want any “divine prerogatives,” for this would lead us back into “strong theology.” Is there a way, however, to envision these “prerogatives” not as essences or properties that add up to divine perfection(s) (the type of οὐσίαι Caputo rejects), but instead as the searching and the demand (rogatio, rogare) that issue from God in direction of the world even before (the Latin prae- in the etymology of the word prerogative) we may have been in a position to hear and answer it? My sense is that such an interpretation may not lie very far from Caputo’s basic intention, which includes the theme of God’s “provocation” (“God is an insistent claim or provocation”12), although my proposal does contradict his view that “whether God comes to exist depends upon whether we resist or assist this insistence.”13 Our responsibility becomes overblown. Ironically, Caputo’s claims recall Martin Luther’s comments on faith as “perfecting divinity” (consummat

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divinitatem) and “creating God” (fides creatrix divinitatis), but Luther distinguished between God as God, and God within us.14 In Caputo’s view, if we pretend to know who God is, if God is identifiable, then our responsibility evaporates: “we can always plead that we are just obeying orders.”15 Here too, I beg to differ. If we posit that God manifests God’s identity in particular ways, that is, under the traits of a kind of benevolence that in fact radically challenges and judges our own less-than-benevolent ways, then isn’t our responsibility as human beings relaunched and increased, as it were, rather than diminished? Caputo seems to presuppose that knowing God’s identity will tend to lead to fanaticism, in which people will do horrendous things and then say they were “just obeying orders,” but this is to put the cart before the horse. In relation with the “calling” that issues from the caller, let us discuss what the identity of the caller may be, for much hinges on this very point (and, since much hinges on this point, the Christian doctrine of God cannot be “optional”). Certainly, the identity of the caller cannot be separated from the call itself, or from the event of the call. But doesn’t the call contain a clue, or a series of clues, concerning the identity of the caller? Isn’t the caller somehow present within the call, rather than remaining exterior to it? As we ponder the call, are we not invited, and even urged, to identify the traits or contours of the caller—without ever pretending to have grasped them, without imagining that the caller is now like a bird in our hand? The End of Providence As a radical partisan of the via negativa, Caputo actually says quite a bit about the identity of the caller—but he says all of this negatively. The caller is not some “hyper-entity” “out there,” ensuring “it will all turn out well in the end.”16 “No one, especially not God, is guaranteeing anything.”17 We are very far here from classic notions of divine providence as a governing (gubernatio) and maintaining of the world. Here too, “weak theology” signals new ways of thinking about God. There is no need, here or anywhere else, to be defensive in principle. We should indeed bid farewell to notions of God as the ultimate, great rescuer of the tragedies we inflict on each other as a species as well as on the natural world in which we live. If we have learned anything from recent history, including the two World Wars, but also from the New Testament passion narratives, it should be that God does not intervene to stop the utter madness we are capable of in the most irrational and inhuman phases or events of human history. God’s “governing” of the world, if we deem it possible to still use this term, has nothing to do with the governing that may be exercised by a worldly or cosmic ruler capable of altering or even stopping certain events: it is not about “control” of the world “from the top,” but rather about the invisible,

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discrete, and perhaps also (at times) not so discrete shaping of this world through the Spirit and the Word and through human mediation—a mediation which, being human, is always ambiguous, never transparent or pure. In the Hebrew Bible, God shapes the history of the people of Israel, as well as, indirectly, the history of the surrounding people, by sending prophets who are (usually unequipped and unwilling) heralds of God’s will. But in our time too, our own societies have been transformed in significant ways by several prophetic figures who have embodied for us God’s will and portrayed before our eyes the demands of living more humanly and justly with one another, of overcoming divisions between us as well as with the world in which we live. We all know these figures. We can name them. If we are able to recognize them and express our gratitude for what they have done, isn’t it because we have understood, certainly imperfectly and inadequately, what God wishes for us? And if others contest our sense that this or that figure, who did much for the sake of the humanity or the humaneness of human beings in our own time, may have something prophetic to her, if others decide to promote other personalities or “leaders” who, in our eyes, quite obviously contradict what God stands for and what God wills, then doesn’t the question I mentioned above, concerning the identifiability of the caller, become once again (as it always does) a burning question? Doesn’t it even become the burning question, as long as it is not disconnected from the other vital questions that animate theological inquiry, and as long as it does not reify “the caller”? The saltiness of theology and of the philosophy of religion depends to a significant extent on how the theme of God comes to expression in their respective discourses. Caputo knows it full well: “All of us theologians, orthodox and rogue alike, agree that everything depends on God.”18 Certainly, this must be done carefully. Indeed, we must “[r]emember always to say ‘perhaps’,”19 but how pervasive should this become, at what moments in our discourses should this word be uttered? It cannot be uttered at all times, but it can be in the back and even in the front of our minds at all times, and it certainly can be expressed at key junctures of our discourses on God (as well as on all the other “themes” that occupy us). Many of the significant thinkers in the history of Christian theology (not to mention other traditions) have expressed this “perhaps,” quite decidedly and forcefully, especially as they embarked and concluded their expositions or accounts.

AGAINST PIETY Caputo squarely rejects pious religiosity and pious theology. Very well! But what does this mean for our thinking about God? Eusebeia, piety, used to imply deep reverence and indeed a certain fear of God: “Here indeed is

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pure religion: faith so joined with an earnest fear of God that this fear also embraces willing reverence (fides cum serio Dei timore coniuncta: ut timor et voluntariam reverentiam in se contineat),” writes Calvin about “the pious mind” in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.20 Take the dimension of God’s “love,” which is ubiquitous in contemporary Western Christianity. What connotations does this dimension have for many believers today? The main ones are certainly not “justice” or “holiness” or the metaphor of “fire,” as might have been the case in past centuries, but—perhaps!—“gentleness” and “comfort.” Christian talk of divine “love,” nowadays, often serves “to pacify and appease.”21 But I don’t see how Caputo’s theology of perhaps, the “thin soup” his God looks like in the eyes of “confessional theology,”22 can address and begin to redress this tendency.

THE WEAKNESS OF GOD Caputo bids farewell to the “almighty” God. His theology is a radical theologia crucis: God is on the side of weakness, not power as we usually construe it. Theistic notions of divine power have led to atheistic rejections: “You get the atheism you deserve, depending on the theism you are serving up.”23 Indeed! And this is the reason why theological work on the theme of God’s power is vital, still today. Caputo, in my view, is too quick in his rejection of this theme. Power means agency. Caputo seems to deny both, in God’s case: “The weakness of God means that God is not an agent who does things or fails to.”24 Yes, God is not “an” agent among a series of discrete creaturely realities who also act.25 But can we avoid speaking of God’s agency if God is the name of an event that “calls,” that “provokes,” if God is not merely a “projection” but a “projectile” headed toward us.26 If God is all of this, can “agency” be cast aside? Disconnecting God from agency might deflate whatever interest and urge we may have in thinking and talking about God. It seems preferable to me to envision God as a sort of constant, invisible agency that invites and even urges us to wake up from our slumber in order to be transformed in all we do and are, in order to become orientated always anew (but also: always inadequately and ambiguously), according to the contours of God’s agency. “It is God’s nature to give,” as Meister Eckhart put it in a sentence Caputo particularly cherishes.27 It is only in this giving and especially in the human response to it, according to Caputo, that God becomes strong.28 We make God exist, we make God strong. Without our response, God simply sinks and vanishes. This is among the most anti-realist discourse possible in theology. Except for one crucial aspect, namely the emphasis on our act as a “response,” the human subject is in charge, everything about God depends on her or him. Something is

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amiss here. But what exactly? Some would say that this is much too anthropocentric, that God does not merely depend on a human response, but, much more broadly, on a creaturely response. And this, arguably, is correct—and Caputo, perhaps at the urging of some friendly readers, embarks in an effort of damage-control on this very point. But I would add that theology cannot place the burden on the human in such a way. Yes, our human response matters. But whatever response we enact is always finite and ambiguous. It does not have the weight that Caputo attributes to it. The imbalance between what we do and what God does in Caputo’s thought is striking. It looks like a reversal of John the Baptist’s words about Jesus in the fourth gospel: illum oportet crescere, me autem minui—he must become greater, I must become less (John 3:30). It is the human response that needs to grow, whereas God’s call and especially the God who calls are shrinking. God’s deed is allowed to occur under the form of a provocation, and only under this form. The rest is up to us. Can’t we envision a divine action that continues beyond the initial “sending” of the call? Does not God have something to do also with and in our responses? Beyond calling, doesn’t God also inspire and shape human lives? Are God’s deeds and our human actions bound to remain in two separate and consecutive spheres? Can’t we imagine a sort of dance between God and us, as Bernard of Clairvaux suggested in his treatise on grace and free will (De gratia et libero arbitrio)?29 The kind of compartmentalizing Caputo seems to posit between what God does (calling) and what human beings do (response) is problematic.

GOD’S LIVINGNESS AND DOGMATIC THEOLOGY It is not just God who insists. Caputo, too, does a lot of this, in the name of the kind of “radical theology” he calls for!30 Caputo insists—we resist? Or should we assist? I would rather put it this way: Caputo insists—we persist! We persist in asking questions, in suggesting that the alternative does not consist in either Caputo’s way—or the “high” way, the way of the “palace theologians”! In the early 1920s, Karl Barth said his theology was not supposed to be the main dish, but the pinch of spice that improves the main dish.31 This could be said of Caputo’s theological works. The great gift John Caputo gives us, despite the redundancies and the caricatures, is a series of questions that prohibit us from thinking simply along the lines of classical theologies. In a gesture that corresponds to the call that issues and that is addressed, Caputo interrupts and bothers our familiar theological ways. And that is important, even vital. For this, theologians may say: merci! But theology does not live merely to deconstruct and to destabilize. It also attempts to build something up. Even Caputo’s theological works aim to do

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that. The question is not whether we should try to build something up or not, but rather how, and why, and what we hope to build up. Caputo seems to see only two possibilities: either relentless deconstruction or the edification of ill-fated metaphysical systems. This of course is (yet another) false alternative. It is strange to see this kind of simple binary play such a role in Caputo’s rejection of “confessing” theology. This is where theologians, “confessing” or otherwise, will challenge him. There clearly is room for more options than the two aforementioned possibilities, including some that attend to both human movement (the movement of response to the call) and divine movement (the movement that is God’s own movement of reaching to God’s beloved creation and creature). There are indeed certain kinds of dogmatic theologies that are in constant danger of becoming frozen, and their God is particularly at risk in that regard: a divinity that is frozen in some kind of perfect or total immutability and omniscience, a divinity that is utterly unworthy of the livingness that lies at the heart of who God is, the life that God is in all God does and is. That God is living is a theme theology ought to consider anew, as a corrective and critique of theistic themes that have fascinated (and that continue to fascinate) theologians and philosophers of religion. I might have missed it, but I do not see this as belonging to Caputo’s agenda, and, if this is correct, I wonder why. God’s livingness is a promising theme, for it points in a direction that steers clear of the endless and sterile debates concerning God’s existence or inexistence (or . . . insistence). Speaking of God’s livingness invites us to focus not so much on the being of God as such (being qua being), as metaphysics tends to do, but instead on the ways of God—and, correspondingly and correlatively, on the ways of human beings in relation to God’s ways.32 At the heart of faith in the two Testaments, as well as in many other scriptures, lies the sense that God, far from being an inert being that humans must somehow render mobile and influential, is the one who unceasingly comes near the world in order to shape it. We do not have to wait until the New Testament and the prologue to John’s gospel to see rather clear indications of a movement of God’s word toward the world, not tangentially at all (as Karl Barth thought in the second edition of his commentary on Romans), but really entering it, in order for certain things to germinate and grow as God wishes them to germinate and grow (readers familiar with the Old Testament will have guessed which text I have in mind here).33 INCARNATION AS DYNAMITE The theme of God’s livingness, of the movement of God in history and among us, is decisive. In Christian theology, it takes a christological shape.

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And here again we see a massive reluctance in Caputo’s writings. The theme of “incarnation” seems to frighten him. He stays away from it as much as he can. He probably sees it, in typical fashion, as the gateway to certain forms of Christian exclusivism: either believe in Jesus Christ as consubstantial with the Father, or else! This, of course, is not how Christian theology usually speaks of the incarnation nowadays, except in certain circles from which both Caputo and I will rather stay away in order to remain free to talk and think, in order to ponder the questions that we have—and, more than that, the questions that we are.34 The theme of incarnation, despite Caputo’s worries, remains a central theme for Christian theology—and, arguably, a decisive theme also in Caputo’s own thinking, especially on the weakness of God, for how could we speak of God’s own weakness if the crucified Jesus has nothing to do with who God is? Doesn’t a theology of the cross such as Caputo’s presume a deep affinity, even a sort of ontological affinity, between the figure of the crucified and God? A rare comment on the incarnation, in Cross and Cosmos, confirms this: Incarnation is an exercise not in metaphysical theology but in a theopoetics of the biblical widow, orphan, and stranger, of every least member of the Kingdom, everyone who stands in need of me, me voici. . . . Whenever and wherever that happens, the logos of the cross has been heard. The Kingdom of God has been established. The word has become flesh.35

We see here something typical of Caputo’s thinking on theological matters: the redirecting of everything, especially the ontological, toward the ethical (in the footsteps of Emmanuel Levinas). No wonder John Caputo is much more at ease with the synoptic gospels, and key passages such as Matt. 25 (as we see it in the previous quotation), than with the fourth gospel and all its seemingly ontological statements (the Prologue; the claims beginning with “I am. . . .”; the farewell discourse). But this gives us a truncated theological vision, for once again a false binary is presented to us: either ontology or ethics. As if “the better part” of theological discourse was the latter. Certainly it is a decisive part, and arguably even the decisive one, the test of it all, of all our convictions. And yet the ethical is not “pure” of the ontological, for the ontological itself does not merely pertain to “being qua being,” but rather to being-in-act. To be is to act. That is true of creatures as well as of God, albeit wholly differently. I am thinking here of a key claim (once again) found in the fourth gospel, a claim that rarely and perhaps never finds its way in John Caputo’s works, and for obvious reasons since he wishes to stay away from the claim that Jesus Christ, and he alone, is the enfleshed Son of God: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). We should note that this verse does not imply that only those who have seen

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Jesus have seen the Father! It claims, differently, that those who happen to have seen him have seen the Father. But what have they seen, those who have seen Jesus, either in person or, more broadly, through the picture the gospels give us of him? They have seen an itinerant teacher and healer who challenges people who consider themselves “righteous” with regard to religious practices and convictions, they have seen a sort of strange prophet who eats and enjoys fellowship with sinners of various kinds, including prostitutes and tax collectors, someone who tells memorable little stories that challenge their ways of thinking, their ways of seeing their neighbor, God, and themselves. Now, if we “apply” or if we consider the verse of John 14:9, we see how the theme of “incarnation” turns out to be not merely (Caputo would go further and say: not at all, but I beg to differ) about Jesus’s consubstantiality with the Father, but about how the contours of what God does and who God is, who and what God favors, become visible. Jesus, for Christians, is “God visible”!36 Again, not necessarily, or in any a priori manner, the only creaturely reality which renders God visible, but, indeed, the one in whom God paradigmatically becomes visible. “God visible” in Jesus of Nazareth? This, far from being dogmatic deadwood, turns out to be incredibly explosive. It “cancels” our theistic assumptions, it crucifies (as Caputo has powerfully but unilaterally shown) all crudely anthropomorphic notions of divine power, and it radically reshapes all of our discourses and representations of God, the world, and ourselves. It carries with it the urgency of a metanoia that theology simply can and will never match or adequately fulfill: the demand that is placed before theology can and will never be met or exhausted. We do what we can, we work at it knowing full well that we will fail.37 But what is true of “incarnation” is, or should be, true of all of the theological loci in Christian theology: they all upend our ways of thinking and seeing the world—or they have not been understood! And so it is worth pondering carefully all theological topics, also in their ontological dimension, that is, in what they convey and express about who God is, who Jesus of Nazareth is, and who we are, so as to illuminate their ethical import. Their ethical import is already located in their ontological dimension—precisely because this ontological dimension is not purely or merely ontological in a sort of “pure substance” metaphysics, but is instead already intrinsically active and relational, and therefore also practical or ethical. This is the reason why, despite my interest in various aspects of his thought, I am far from being fully on board with his project of a “weak theology” and a theology of God’s weakness. It is too reductive and minimalist. It (ironically, given Caputo’s massive and supposedly “radical” deconstruction effort) presents binaries that deserve to be—radically!—challenged.

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Helmut Gollwitzer already warned against these binaries in the late 1960s: Our theological discussion has . . . been divided between a conservative insistence on the dogmatic tradition, and a liberal repudiation of dogmatic content in exchange for an ethic of shared humanity. We are thus falling back into the worst tradition of the nineteenth century, in which conservative theologians were wont to be conservative in politics also, and the liberals believed themselves obliged to discard dogma in exchange for humanism. But this means tearing asunder things that belong together. Every article of the Confession of Faith has explosive and aggressive significance for the status quo of the old world, and an article that leaves our relationship to the other human being and to society as it was, is not worthy to be an article of the Christian Faith.38

The theme of “incarnation” should be introduced to people with a clearly visible label that says: “handle with care!” FINAL REMARKS Caputo dreams of “a new species of theologians, weak theologians.”39 But do weak theologians need a weak God? Doesn’t the weakness of God, in Caputo’s theology, end up reinforcing the human being’s importance? Yes, God “calls,” and God may well be the name of the “caller.” But God does not merely call. God also inspires and shapes human lives as well as all living things. John Caputo’s theological insights are provocative and worth pondering. They helpfully challenge “classical” doctrines. But there may be a way to “redeem” some of these doctrines by showing how they challenge our conceptual habits and prejudices, how they nourish a kind of faith that is both anchored and opposed to all forms of arrogance and lack of (self-)critical thinking. Some of the rooms that Caputo wishes to see closed once and for all in various theological buildings may still deserve a visit, especially if we enter them with the desire to open the windows and refurbish them.

NOTES 1. Friederike Rass mentions Caputo’s “suchenden, oftmals kreisenden Schreibstil.” Friederike D. Rass, Die Suche nach Wahrheit im Horizont fragmentarischer Existenzialität: Eine Studie über den Sinn der Frage nach ‘Gott’ in der Gegenwart in Auseinandersetzung mit Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo und Jean-Luc Nancy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 127.

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2. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 9. 3. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 101. 4. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 12–13. 5. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 13. 6. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 13. 7. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 15. 8. Rass makes a similar point in her book Die Suche nach Wahrheit, 134, when she notes the “völlige Unterbestimmung des Aspekts, dass der Mensch von sich aus Gott zwar nicht fassen kann, Gott sich aber gerade darum für den Menschen in Jesus Christus erfahrbar gemacht hat.” 9. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 13. 10. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 36. 11. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 21, also 15 and 29. 12. Insistence, 13. 13. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 14. 14. Martin Luther, “Commentary on Galatians (1535),” Weimar Ausgabe 40/1, 360 (“ea [=fides] consummat divinitatem et, ut ita dicam, creatrix est divinitatis, non in substantia Dei, sed in nobis”); Luther’s Works, vol. 26, edited and translated by Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963), 227. See HansMartin Barth, “Fides creatrix divinitatis: Bemerkungen zu Luthers Rede von Gott und dem Glauben,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 14:1 (1972), 89–106. 15. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 15. 16. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 19. 17. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 18. 18. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 28. 19. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 23. 20. J. Calvin, “Institutes of the Christian Religion, I,ii,2,” edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 43; Opera selecta 3, edited by Peter Barth and Wilhelm Niesel (Münich: Chr. Kaiser, 3rd ed. 1967), 37. Instead of immediately dismissing Calvin as a “theologian of glory” and therefore as one of the “strong theologians” we need to leave in the past, my option is to keep reading him—as well as the others—and certainly remain acutely aware, at all times if possible, of the risks entailed by such “robust” theologies. I fully agree with Caputo on “how much the will of God” is often “a cover for willful men, for power and domination, plain and simple,” Caputo, The Insistence of God, 27. No wonder so many people in the Western world and in other parts of the world do not want to have anything to do any longer with “the will of God”! 21. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 24. 22. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 103. 23. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 30. 24. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 31. 25. It is one of the merits of Hartmut von Sass to have asked what it may mean to speak of God’s act, not as an “additional intervention” among other events and

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occurrences, not as an intervention whose subject is an entity that counts as one “ingredient” (a “religious ingredient;” “[eine] religiöse Zutat zur Welt,” as Gerhard Ebeling put it) among innumerable other ingredients and as an addition to them all, but as what qualifies reality in a distinctively new way. Hartmut von Sass, Gott als Ereignis des Seins: Versuch einer hermeneutischen Onto-Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), esp. 322 and 333–4. His guiding question is this one (333): “wie Gott als wirkliches und darin am Menschen wirkendes Gegenüber eben dieses Menschen zu denken sei, ohne dass die Widerständigkeit Gottes zu dessen ‘gefährlicher Verendlichung’ führen müsste.” 26. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 28. 27. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 35. 28. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 37. 29. “Let us then beware lest, when we perceive these things to be invisibly enacted within us and with our co-operation, we attribute them either to our own will, which is weak; or to any external necessity imposed upon God, of which there is none; and not to grace alone of which God is full. Grace it is which moves free choice, when it sows the seeds of good thoughts; which heals it, when it changes the disposition; which strengthens it, when it persuades it to external action; which keeps it, so that is may not suffer failure. But grace works with free choice in such a manner that, while in the first instance it only prevents it; afterwards it accompanies it. . . . It is not that grace does part, and free choice does part; but each does the entire work by its ­individual energy.” Bernard of Clairvaux, “Concerning Grace and Free Will,” chap. 14, translated by Watkin W. Williams (London: SPCK, 1920), 83–83 (rev.). In the more recent translation of the treatise, published by Daniel O’Donovan, On Grace and Free Choice (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication, 1988), see there 105–6. 30. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 82. 31. “They need only perhaps to put up with my theology as a corrective, as ‘a pinch of spice’ to the main meal, as Kierkegaard says.” Karl Barth, “The Need and Promise of Christian Proclamation,” in The Word of God and Theology, edited by Amy Marga (London-New York: Bloomsbury-T&T Clark, 2011), 104 (see also 128). See S. Kierkegaard, “‘The Sacrificed Ones’, the Correctives,” NB 26 47 (1852), in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, NB26–NB30, vol. 9, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 49. 32. I share Hartmut von Sass’s caution with regard to the common concern on pairing “God” and “being”: “Das oft beklagte Amalgam aus Deus und ens, so die hier leitende Vermutung, muss nun nicht unbedingt einer onto-theologischen Verführung gleichen, sondern könnte als Onto-Theologie gerade ein Kapitel ‘nach’ der Metaphysik sein.” von Sass, Gott als Ereignis des Seins, 304. 33. The text I am thinking of is Isaiah 55:10–13. 34. It is not just Paul Tillich who claims, too simply as David Tracy, has shown in Blessed Rage for Order, that we have questions, whereas revelation is the answer or provides answers. In 1922, in a well-known lecture (“The Word of God as the Task of Theology”), Karl Barth wrote this against dogmatic theology and orthodoxy (this might be Barth at his most Caputo-like and probably not radical enough in Caputo’s eyes): “The weakness of orthodoxy is not the so-called supernaturalistic content of

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the Bible and dogma. . . . Its weakness lies in the fact that we (in that we are all a bit dogmatic) cannot get past making this content into an object, a thing, even when it is the word ‘God’. . . . we sense that this is not how it works. . . . Why is this not how it works? Because the human’s question about God is abolished by this kind of answer. He no longer has a question, for an answer stands in its place. But he is a human and as such, he cannot let the question go. For he himself, the human, is the question.” 35. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos. A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 139. 36. See Brian E. Daley, God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered (OxfordNew York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 37. For a brilliant, sharp, and salutary warning against “claims to mastery” by theologians and for a reminder of theology’s “incompletion” and its “proclivity toward failure,” see Linn Marie Tonstad, “(Un)wise Theologians: Systematic Theology in the University,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 22:4 (2020), 494–511. 38. Helmut Gollwitzer, “The Political Consequences of the Gospel Today,” in H. Gollwitzer, The Rich Christians and the Poor Lazarus, translated by David Cairns (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 3 (rev.). Quoted in Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), vii. 39. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barth, Hans-Martin. “Fides creatrix divinitatis: Bemerkungen zu Luthers Rede von Gott und dem Glauben.” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 14:1 (1972), 89–106. Barth, Karl. “The Need and Promise of Christian Proclamation.” In The Word of God and Theology, edited by Amy Marga. London-New York: Bloomsbury-T&T Clark, 2011, 101–30. Barth, Karl. “The Word of God as the Task of Theology.” In The Word of God and Theology, edited by Amy Marga. London-New York: Bloomsbury-T&T Clark, 2011, 171–98. Calvin, Johannes. Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960, Calvin, Johannes. Opera selecta 3, edited by Peter Barth and Wilhelm Niesel. Münich: Chr. Kaiser, 1967. Caputo, John D. On Grace and Free Choice, translated by Watkin W. Williams. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication, 1988. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos. A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. Clairvaux, Bernard. Concerning Grace and Free Will, translated by Watkin W. Williams. London: SPCK, 1920. Daley, Brian E. God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kierkegaard, Soren. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, NB26–NB30, vol. 9, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. Luther, Martin. “Commentary on Galatians (1535).” In Luther’s Works, vol. 26, edited and translated by Jaroslav Pelikan. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963, Putt, Keith B. The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Rass, Friederike D. Die Suche nach Wahrheit im Horizont fragmentarischer Existenzialität: Eine Studie über den Sinn der Frage nach ‘Gott’ in der Gegenwart in Auseinandersetzung mit Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo und Jean-Luc Nancy. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017. Tanner, Kathryn. The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Tonstad, Linn Marie. “(Un)wise Theologians: Systematic Theology in the University.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 22:4 (2020), 494–511 Von Sass, Hartmut. Gott als Ereignis des Seins: Versuch einer hermeneutischen Onto-Theologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.

Response to Chalamet John D. Caputo

I would like to thank Christophe Chalamet for the close and robust reading he has made of my work. I never fail to learn from him, and I am grateful to him for his liberal hospitality when he invited me to speak at a conference he held in Geneva, entirely dedicated to First Corinthians 1-2.1 What he says here has the merit of making me go back to basics and explain what I am saying in a direct—but no less robust—way. By “weak” theology I mean a post-theist theology and corresponding conceptions of spirituality and prayer, faith and hope, gift and praise. That is the underlying difference between me and Chalamet, who recommends I revisit the work of progressive theologians who have tempered the claims of classical theism, retrenching them in such a way as to alleviate the problems I raise. I am in the debt of progressive theologians, especially when they fall afoul of the powers that be, which means for me that they are hitting upon radical ground; they are whistler-blowers signaling there is something out of joint in the corporation. But even that will not do. I am, in fact, following several progressive theologians where they did not intend to lead—having been prompted by Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Moltmann, and Tillich, on the Protestant side, and the theologians inspiring Vatican II, like Congar, Küng, Rahner, and Schillebeeckx on the Catholic side, all of whom have helped me see that God is a not a discrete agent, however discreet the agency. In weak theology, the name of God is a symbol, a figure, a Vorstellung, an icon, an imaginative construction. I do not think it has representational value, that it picks out a supreme being, or even a ground of being, in rerum natura. I do not think that a being called God exists. Being an atheist about the God of theism is not the end of theology for me; it is the beginning of a radical theology. This atheism does not represent a negation, pace Chalamet, but an affirmation that precedes and exceeds the positive positions adopted in 191

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classical theology. It describes a way of living in touch with what is of unconditional worth in life, which I first described as a radical hermeneutics. When, later on, I described it as a theology, it was always with an asterisk, qualified as postmodern, weak, or radical. The weakness of God does not mean there is a being called God who turns out to be weak, not omnipotent. Weak theology means I do not think there is a being there or a ground of being to do anything, or to fail to do it. I take prayer seriously, but I do not think there is Someone to whom we pray. For me, everything turns on the event of the call. The call calls. It insists; it does not exist. It calls for existence. It can be ignored, distorted, manipulated, or even attacked, and it has no army, physical or metaphysical, with which to defend itself. The call is unprotected, weak, crucified, and nonviolent, and it has nothing to back it up except the call itself, which calls for justice, love, dwelling poetically on the earth. It calls because it calls. The call cannot punish us if we do not heed it and it will not reward us if we do. It is not there to do any of that. It calls and it is up to us to be there, to show up, to give it existence, to make it happen. Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat? Period, tout court! No terrifying Son of Man comes to judge the nations. None of the cynicism of “religious” people who think that if there were no system of heavenly reward and punishment (“if this is all there is”), then why not just indulge any appetite (so long as you don’t end up in jail)? Chalamet’s criticisms assume there is a being called God who is behind the call, issuing it, sustaining it, who “inspires and shapes” our lives, who thinks and acts and chooses, who does and sometimes fails to do things we hoped he/she (you see the problem) would do. I think that is a theo-anthropomorphism, a personification of something important—inspiring and shaping our lives—something that is being called in the name of God. A personification is a work of our imaginary, which is not to be dismissed as some kind of subjective buzz! It is how we express our love. Feuerbach was only half right. We do project but that is in response to something by which we have always already been overtaken, an event of unconditional import going on in the name of God. I agree there is something that inspires and shapes our lives. That is the call. Chalamet seems to think that if this Someone is not there to do the calling our lives are unshaped and uninspired. I do not. So, then, who or what is calling? The call gets itself called in the calling, in the middle voice—that is, it is an emergent effect, a collective effect of a system or a network, of a language, a culture, a history, a geography, which seizes the imagination of a community and tradition. A theology is like what MerleauPonty says about a language, it is a way to sing the world (and there are many songs). Every theology is a theology of the culture it animates; every culture has a theology, otherwise it is just a place where people hang their hat. The call is not called by an identifiable caller, except as a poetic construction, a

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personification of certain forces in our lives, a focus imaginarius in which the creative energies which inspire and shape our lives converge. That does not make the name of God an arbitrary fiction. This name arises from the deepest (and also the darkest) even visceral recesses of our heart, giving name and word to what matters most to us. It is the name of something deep, but not the name of being who does or does not do things. It names and explains the best of us and the worst, and it is in that name that we do both the most sublime and the most odious things. Pace Chalamet, this is a “living God” because it is the very name of a form a life, of a life-world, of a mode of living-in and being-in-the-world, which is galvanized around this name. God’s existence is the form of life which has been forged in response to the events that call out to us in that name. This name is sustained by and in the form of life in which it has been engendered. If that form of life withers—and there are multiple signs of that today—if this name loses its galvanizing force, it will not be saved by an argument, just as it could not be established by one. “Onto-theo-logic,” analytic or Thomistic proofs for the “existence of God” are a fool’s errand, which Tillich rightly calls “mythical and half blasphemous.” What is going on in the name of God is testified to, not proven, and if it becomes moribund, then it cannot be argued back into existence. Symbols cannot be refuted, but they can die. This is not anthropocentrism, but a critique of anthropocentrism. I have not transferred God’s omnipotence to us. I am not maximizing the power of humankind, which has managed to make quite a mess of itself, but its responsibilities. Like Bonhoeffer, I am saying it is time we behaved like adults. I don’t think anyone or anything is omnipotent, God (s’il y en a) or us or even, if the physicists are right, the universe itself, which is headed for entropic dissipation (a maximally weak energy state). The alternative is to assert that there is some superior being who somehow—embarrassingly (conservative theology) or discreetly (progressive theology)—is going to help us out. I think that the human species is collectively responsible—which does not guarantee that we will behave responsibly—for the way we treat one another and our planetary home. The advent of the “Anthropocene,” the present spate of ruthless autocrats on the rise around the world today, the widespread meanness and cruelty to immigrants, the distress we cause one another and other species and the planet are the sole doing of our species, which is not because we are “fallen” from a mythical state of “innocence” but because we are free, as I discussed in my response to Benjamins. Higher help is not on the way. When Heidegger said only a God can save us now, he meant a dramatic paradigm shift in the current historical constellation. Heidegger, too, was a post-theist. What then? What are we to do? The way out, if there is one, there may not be, is to heed the “better angels of our nature.” What? Angels? Voices

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calling? What call? Who is calling? Does it leave its calling card? How can we trust it? In what language does it speak? You can sense the misunderstanding. These “voices” are captured in philosophy and science and art and also—despite everything it does to make itself unbelievable—in “religion.” They can be discerned in scriptures, which are the work of theopoets, more conceptual than artists, more sensuous than philosophers, fellow human beings like us, “inspired” only as poets are inspired, not by any supernatural power. These theopoets are dreaming of what the world would look like, in the subjunctive, if “God,” that is, if the events that are harbored in that name, held sway—the “kingdom of God” is a poem, a theo-poem—instead of the “powers and principalities,” that is, the worse angels of our nature. So I am encouraging human imagination, not endorsing human omnipotence. So far I have not come upon anything that is omnipotent. I invoke a “cosmopoetics” to protect myself and others against “human exceptionalism” and also to catch sight of the way that today the mystery is gradually inching itself away from theology and getting closer to cosmology. In Specters of God, I examine Schelling, who also thought that God’s existence depends on us, which he tried to reconcile with theism. His is a fascinating vacillation between theism and panentheism. Schelling is Tillich’s muse, and Tillich is my favorite official theologian, while Derrida is my favorite unofficial one. Theopoetics protects texts like the scriptures from being believed by orthodox theologians and disbelieved by atheistic reductionists. Then they can be read, heard, heeded, listened to, taken to heart, allowed to speak for themselves, safe from both metaphysical or theological mystification or institutional authorization and from rationalistic, reductionistic attack, and we can be exposed to what they call for without religious intimidation or secular scorn. Theopoetics is not a “full-blown apophaticism that denies any knowledge, any identification, even provisionally and fragmentarily, of God.” The (Abrahamic) name of “God” is one of our best names for the mystery which we all are. It is a figure, an image, a Vorstellung of something, we know not what, of the possibility of the impossible. It is the known in the unknown, rich with “revelation,” meaning a poetic insight into a form of life ruled by prophetic justice and Christian love. But I distinguish the revealed Gott from the hidden Gottheit, the deus absconditus (who in Luther’s feverish anxiety might very well condemn a just soul to hell). I am all for knowledge, the more knowledge the better, but as the island of knowledge expands, the shorelines of ignorance grow longer. About 95% of the universe is invisible to us; all we know is restricted to the visible one. It may be the case that this datablelocatable Abrahamic name God, that every name, that the lives of everyone who ever has or ever will ever live on this little blue dot in a vast galactic space (Carl Sagan) is but a brief cosmic flash, a moment, an Augenblick on a remote corner of a galaxy, following which there will be eternal silence,

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mute, dark, cold oblivion. Perhaps. I do not know. That is my apophaticism. Whether this is or is not so, life should be lived, as Eckhart said, “without why,” lived and loved, affirmed in all its “difficult glory,” yes, yes, for what it is, as long as it is, until it is not, Amen, Alleluia.2 So I, who have written a book entitled Against Ethics, do not reduce religion to ethics! My criticism of Levinas, following Derrida, is that tout autre est tout autre, not just the other person, not just ethics. The affirmation of the event is the affirmation of all things great and small. Radical theology is a prayer, a doxology to the world, the promise of the world, to the whole world, a cosmo-doxology to the worlding of the world, to its beauty and depth, which worlds because it worlds, world without why, Amen. The event that is going on in the name of God is not confined to God, to religion, or to ethics. It is the name of profound gaudium in life itself, despite its difficulties.3 The call calls Gaudete! Out of the deepest respect for the world, I refrain from trying to identify the caller of the call. I want the call to be as wide and deep as possible. There is no “compartmentalizing” here. I want to be multitudes (Walt Whitman). There is the world, the worlding of the world.4 It is a misunderstanding of and disservice to the word deconstruction to enforce a choice between “relentless deconstruction” (as if this were a term of abuse) and “the edification of ill-fated metaphysical systems.” Any careful study of what this word means—and I have spent nearly forty years trying to explain this—is the recovery of the event by which things are inwardly disturbed in order to restore them to their future and to keep their memory of the past alive. Without it, there is rigidification and petrification; without it, there would no such thing as the progressive theologians Chalamet prefers. To deconstruct something is to say I love you, “relentlessly,” I will never give up on you, I want you to live on, sur-vivre. I want to release the possibility of the impossible by which you are inwardly inhabited. Once deconstruction is understood in a responsible way, not as a term of abuse, I can say that everything I say about God and religion and theology I have learned from the Christian traditions in which I was born and the Jewish sources from they derive. Radical theology does not devolve into two binary possibilities. Radical theology insists; it does not exist, not of itself. It is not a rival church or theology or religion. Radical theology is always the radicalization of something, of the tradition one inherits, upon which it is, as Derrida does not hesitate to say, “parasitic.” We cannot forget about Jesus. I do have a low estimation of High Christology, which is Neoplatonic metaphysical speculation gone on holiday. It would have left a Galilean healer, prophet and exorcist named Yeshua of Nazareth dumbfounded, even scandalized, as people like Geza Vermes (my favorite) have shown. I am far more interested in Yeshua and his stories than in Neoplatonism, in his poem about the “kingdom of God,” and in the “dangerous

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memory” of Yeshua, the memory and the promise of the kingdom, before it fell into the hands of the councils. The “Incarnation” in radical theology is a theopoetics in which we take Yeshua to be an icon in which we have an intuition of what is going on in the name of. In the Incarnation, Yeshua is raised up into theopoetic space, where they killed him but he would not stay dead, where he heals the lame and drives out our demons and promises us that the year of Jubilee is near. Of course, two millennia later and counting, it is still not here because this is a year in theopoetic time, not calendar time. Nobody is actually counting up to fifty. If High Christology is an exotic metaphysical exfoliation of Yeshua, historical-critical work is, while an important demythologization, not the last word, as Bultmann shows. What is ultimately important is the call, the theopoetics, which Yeshua “incarnates.” Of course, had I (or Chalamet) been switched at birth and had never heard the name of Yeshua, then we would have inherited different icons, symbols, Vorstellungen, imaginaries—and then the task would be to radicalize that, to read, to heed, the events astir in that tradition. One tradition’s “revelation” is another’s “mythology.” Theopoetics relativizes that distinction. So I agree with Chalamet that I do not draw much “inspiration” from the highly Hellenic imaginary of the Fourth Gospel. If we could somehow persuade Yeshua that the author of the fourth gospel was actually talking about him, which I doubt, I think that Yeshua would have been profoundly shocked by how little love the gospel of love shows for his people, as if “the Jews” were somebody else. Really?5 NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, “The Weakness of God: A Radical Theology of the Cross,” in The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1-2 in Theological Exploration, Chalamet, Christophe and Askani, Hans-Christoph, eds. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 25–79. 2. This is pretty much the distilled argument of Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 3. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 241–45. 4. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), chapter 12 (“The Grace of the World”). 5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), chapter 11.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.

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Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. “The Weakness of God: A Radical Theology of the Cross.” In The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1-2 in Theological Exploration, edited by Christophe Chalamet and Hans-Christoph Askani, 25–79. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Chapter 9

God—the Opportunity for Continued Discontent Jan-Olav Henriksen

Leonard Cohen confesses in one of his last songs before his death: “Magnified, sanctified / Be the holy name / Vilified, crucified / In the human frame / A million candles burning / For the help that never came / You want it darker / Hineni, hineni / I’m ready, my Lord.” I was reminded of this song—You want it darker—as I started re-reading John Caputo’s work for this chapter. Three elements in Cohen’s song made me think of Caputo’s work. First, the song is prayer—and prayer is a central theme in Caputo’s writing. Second, mentioning God’s name as something constantly vilified, crucified, and bent by humans is an apparent cause for criticism of theology that establishes solid frames for the use of that name. And finally, the mentioning of the unending expectation of what seems impossible in light of the sufferings of this world—a trope that is more relevant than ever in light of the contemporary global situation. We find all of this in Caputo’s thinking. Protest, ambiguity, and the continuous will to articulate the uneasiness, reserve, sometimes even protest in addressing God is something Cohen and Caputo have in common. In this chapter, I want to point to what I hold as an essential contribution by John Caputo when we speak about experiencing God: How prayer as practice opens up to an experience of the world that might also have political consequences. This might seem somewhat contrary to how his work is often perceived: is he not a thinker in the tradition of deconstructivism? Will a reading like the following not entail that he is read as a constructive thinker? However, a firm engagement with his work will show that a deconstructive approach might lead to transformations and open venues that can be considered as constructive in the sense that it provides a substantial basis for further reflections on the topics he treats. Moreover, we must ask right away: Can God be experienced? How? Why should we think of God as someone we can experience? Or should we not 199

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think of God in this way? Caputo’s explorations into the name of God, what it means, and what it stirs up provide challenging venues for answering such questions. I hope that a reconstruction of Caputo’s understanding of God as an event and as experienced will result in seeing that he combines the consistent and enduring weak power to be with the interruptive power to create something new. Both these features are reflected in instances that may be, but need not be, identified as human experiences of God. Hence, one could ask if Caputo is closer to an orthodox understanding of God than what initially seems to be the case.1 But to what extent we can find an answer to this latter question will remain open—and perhaps it is only possible to ask, and not to answer it. Experiencing God: can God be experienced? In what way? How, if at all? To find an answer—a possible answer—we can look at the religious practice that appears in many of Caputo’s writings: Prayer. Prayer is a practice in which God announces Godself. Simultaneously, it is a practice in which God is silent. Nevertheless, prayer presents itself as a topic for considering the possibility of experiencing God. Before I go deeper into this topic, I want to pick up on a point that Walter Lowe referred to from Theodor Adorno’s essay on Reason and revelation: Adorno writes: “The excision of the objective element from religion is no less harmful to it than the reification that aims to impose dogma . . . inflexibly and antirationally upon the subject.” Lowe comments, aptly, that “The excision of the ‘objective’ element is no less harmful than fideistic reification.”2 Lowe is aware of the fact that many regard with alarm the notion that there is an objective element to religion, and even more so for its falling into the hands of the theologians3—often with good reason (cf. Cohen’s, “Vilified, crucified in the human frame”). He also makes the apt comment that “insofar as there is such an element, it will demonstrate its objectivity by its independence of the theologian.”4 And he agrees with Adorno that the antidote to reification of the religious other cannot be a disavowal of any objective element. Adorno’s and Lowe’s joined reflections are deeply Hegelian, insofar as they point to the need to overcome understanding religion as a mere product of subjectivity. Religion is, instead, a way of engaging with reality—but not in an objectifying or reifying way. As Caputo repeatedly argues (often with reference to Derrida), religion is to keep open the door to the impossible—that which is beyond control and calculation, that which appears as an event and which might lead us to a protest against the actual present. Despite his many references to Kierkegaard, perhaps Caputo is then more Hegelian than it appears at first sight. We can make a case that it is so by looking into three elements in his thinking: Experience, prayer, and event.

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EXPERIENCE Caputo holds that “the very idea of ‘experience’ drives us to the idea of God.”5 He backs up this claim as follows: The very idea of “God” is of something that (or of someone who) sustains and sharpens what we mean by experience, with the result that the “experience of God” requires a “God of experience.” On this hypothesis, then, “God” and “experience” are intersecting, pre-fitted notions that fit together hand in glove. This is all possible, I will hypothesize, only in virtue of the impossible, of what I call, after Derrida, “the impossible.” The impossible will be the bridge, the crucial middle term in my logic, that links “God” and “experience.”6

One could argue that this way of relating God and experience suggests that experience contains something other than it, something not graspable, something that, everything taken into consideration, appears as the condition for experience. As a condition for experience, the awareness of this ungraspable element is only accessible by means of a transcendental reflection that asks about what appears as impossible in light of present experience. Here, a transcendental reflection becomes visible in Caputo’s work, in which the impossible appears as the bridge that connects the experiencing of that which is possible and present-at-hand with that which is its condition—a condition that cannot appear as conditioned by the present, and therefore, in light of its transcendental character, remains impossible. The condition for all experience is, theologically speaking, God. Against this backdrop, it makes sense when Caputo writes that “the experience of the impossible makes the experience of God possible, or, to put it slightly differently, that we love God because we cannot help but love the impossible.”7 From a phenomenological point of view, this understanding of the role of God in experience is, in one way, not too distant from a Gadamerian understanding of hermeneutical experience that challenges and changes our preconceptions and expectations. However, Caputo throws the notions of God and the impossible into the mix here, when he describes the experience of the impossible as “that which shatters the horizon of expectation and foreseeability. For if every experience occurs within a horizon of possibility, the experience of the impossible is the experience of the shattering of this horizon,”8 Against this backdrop, Gadamer writes about how every experience entails an openness to new experience and claims that every experience thus contains, by its very nature, a dialectical element.9 Also Caputo builds on insights into dialectics, but not in a Hegelian way that prioritizes one stage on behalf of the other.10 His open dialectic manifests itself in how one element (the possible) points beyond itself to something different (the impossible), which in turn becomes important for the realization of what an experience

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entails. This recognition of an open dialectical element plays an important role in his thinking and illuminates the transcendental reflection and its result. One more element in Caputo’s understanding of experience can be elucidated by Gadamer’s insights into the dialectical element it contains: experience always also entails an awareness of human finitude—the finitude that gives rise to the experience of the impossible: by experiencing our finitude, we can discover “the limits of the power and the self-knowledge . . . ‘to recognize what is’ does not mean to recognize what is just at this moment here, but to have insight into the limitations within which the future is still open to expectation and planning or, even more fundamentally, that all the expectation and planning of finite beings is finite and limited.”11 Thus, in experience, we are caught between the finite and the impossible, of which the latter also signifies the infinite, since it cannot be demarcated, circumscribed, determined by us. To be open to experience is, according to Caputo, to “have a taste for adventure, for venturing and risk.” “[E]xperience is really experience when we venture where we cannot or should not go; experience happens only if we take a chance, only if we risk going where we cannot go, only if we have the nerve to step where angels fear to tread, precisely where taking another step farther is impossible.”12 The dialectic to which Gadamer also points is then reframed by Caputo in the following manner: Having, or rather venturing, an experience, involves a double operation: first we understand full well that it is impossible to go, that we are blocked from moving ahead, that we cannot take another step, that we have reached the limit: then we go. We venture out and take the risk, perilous as it may be. First immobilization, then movement.13

As Caputo states, we know well what the limits are of what is possible. Nevertheless, to search for experience in the qualified sense he intends to address means “a shift to the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order (which is also related to peira), to a certain non-cognitive leap that overcomes the hesitations of the understanding.”14 And, I would argue, this is why prayer, as a practice, is so important in his work. Prayer is a response to the experience of the impossible.

PRAYER In The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, Caputo writes that “God insists upon existing,” and relates this to the practice of prayer. Prayer appears as a mode for experiencing the God that cannot be put to rest. Against

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this backdrop, we need to ask: What is a practice—and what does prayer as a practice entail for the experience of God? Experiences of God are not emerging out of thin air. In many cases they are linked to human practices. And Caputo admits that prayer is a central theme in his writings.15 How does Caputo describe the practice of prayer? As a practice in which subjectivity realizes that it is called upon and constituted as something specific by another, external instance: “Prayer means calling upon a God who calls.”16 Distancing himself from the pious uses of prayer, he sees it as a response to a precarious and uncertain situation, a response by those “who are at the mercy of events, at the mercy of ‘perhaps’—and who is not?” Pointing to how life is precarious, prayer is a response. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Caputo relates this state of precariousness to the present, planetary conditions on which we live.17 This point will be taken up in the conclusion. Thus, prayer as a response presupposes something to respond to. By invoking God in prayer, one responds to the God who provokes this response, without having to know this God. Prayer practice does not presuppose a fixed or strong theology. However, as a practice, prayer is not something humans invent as a response—prayer is participation in a practice where the situation is recognized in a particular manner: “They pray who are in an uncertain situation—and who is not?—unable to see what is coming, hounded by the wolves of unforeseeable forces, praying for the grace of an event. They pray who appreciate the precariousness of life, the fragility of what we love or desire, which is made all the more precious by its precariousness.”18 We can elaborate further on prayer as a practice by relating Caputo to Andreas Reckwitz’s theory about social practices allows for a profound understanding of participation in prayer. In so doing, he avoids approaches that identify the condition for the social merely in mental qualities, discourse, or interaction. Instead, he sees “social practices” as the smallest unit for understanding human participation in the world through religious means. For Reckwitz, “A ‘practice’ (Praktik) is a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.”19 Reckwitz’s understanding of practice implies three important elements for our analysis of the role of prayer in Caputo’s understanding of the experience of God: The first is that every practice is a “block” where different elements are present. Consequently, no practice can be reduced to one single element or seen as constituted by only one of them.20 Second, Reckwitz sees a practice as a pattern that can be filled with a multitude of single and often unique actions that reproduce the action in question in a variety of ways. Thus, not only signs

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that constitute practices have a certain openness, but the practices themselves are not necessary to carry out in only one way. Prayer provides an excellent example, as it can be performed in a multitude of ways. Finally, Reckwitz holds that a single individual, as a bodily and mental agent, acts as a carrier of the practice and can, in fact, be the carrier of many different practices that do not always need to be coordinated with each other. As Reckwitz writes, “Thus, she or he is not only a carrier of patterns of bodily behavior, but also of routinized ways of understanding, knowing how, and desiring.”21 He also claims that these routinized mental activities are “necessary elements and qualities of a practice in which the individual participates, not qualities of the individual.”22 I would argue that this means that we can see the individual as someone in which these elements manifest themselves when he or she participates in the actual practice. Practice is, therefore, more than a mere individual activity, as it relates to more than what the individual intends or does. Given that a human being can be a carrier of different practices that are not always coordinated with each other, believers may not always be consistent when it comes to the relationship between their faith and other things they practice. Against this backdrop, it makes sense to realize that prayer practice is not a straightjacket for a specific response ordained by the few—it can be done in a multitude of ways. Thus, one can have different points of departure for entering into the practice of prayer. And Caputo seems to concur with Reckwitz when he writes that “The theologians arrive at a scene that has already been constituted in human experience. Prayer is older than theology and it is not the private property of the long robes who make a profitable living out of saying ‘Lord, Lord’.”23 In other words, we must realize that the theologians are not those who are entitled to define the how and what of prayer—it is a practice that also existed prior to the theologians—a fact that directs us in the direction of alternative modes of being religious—without the conditions of established religion. Given that God as the impossible manifests Godself in the response we give to the world in prayer, it also makes sense to say, as Caputo does, that God insists upon existing, and this in turn is tied up, to the point of being identifiable with the question of prayer. Prayer emerges from the distance between insistence and existence. Prayer is the precarious way God’s insistence seeks existence. The “insistence of God” refers to the insistent way that God calls upon us, while “prayer” refers to the act of calling upon and responding to God’s call, remembering always that the name of God is the name of trouble.24

Hence, for Caputo, to pray to God does not entail that one tries to use God for one’s own purposes—but it means to open oneself up to possible trouble. God cannot be understood in such a way, as the God addressed in prayer is a weak god: “The weakness of God means that God is not an agent who does things

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or fails to. We are the agents and so we are also the ones who fail. God’s perfection is that God does not do anything wrong, but that is only because God is not a being who does things in the first place.”25 The dialectic between humans and God, the possible and the impossible, is what comes to the fore in prayer understood in this manner: “In prayer, the sheer fortuitousness of things is released; the chance of an event is put in play.”26 Moreover, this dialectic entails that Prayer is asking God for help while at the same time God is asking us for help, each petition intertwined with the other over the fate of a contingent world. The path of prayer is a two-way street, precarious in either direction.”27 Accordingly, Caputo’s phenomenology of prayer underscores the risk and the precariousness it opens up to, just as much as it is a response to this precariousness and risk. Prayer is not command or control, but attention to the world, in which God is involved as the placeholder for the impossible, that for which we must wait, for which we can hope—but not in a way that excludes our participation in prayer as well as agency. The practice of prayer thus is one of those things that enable us to realize that there is more to this world than what is immediately present—there is the possibility of an event. The event is the risk beyond the present—in the present. By seeing prayer in such a perspective, Caputo is able to articulate how the experience of God is mediated by or through the practice of prayer.

EVENT Events do not exist, says Caputo, they insist.28 He also claims that it is we who give them existence. If he is right, they cannot be taken to originate exclusively from us. In this way, events are intertwined in a dialectic related to the one I have already pointed to above. So let us assume that it is reasonable to make this distinction for the sake of argument.29 Events would then entail cooperation, relation, and response to something other—and in this sense, the event is not subjected to reification and is not the result of pure subjectivity. For Caputo, they imply call and response. He writes that they are what we cannot see coming, and they are not what is happening, but what is going on in what happens.30 Thus, the event qualifies the everyday by making it stand out and lose its character as ordinary. Interpreted in this way, the distinction between insistence and existence entails that events open up to something new in what happens. They gain their character of insistence insofar as they challenge us to establish another view, what Gadamer would call a hermeneutical experience, one that means that “to understand and to interpret means to discover and recognize a valid meaning.”31

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In this sense, events are more than the merely factual, they constitute another mode of being in the world. Caputo suggests some of this when he relates events to a quasi-transcendental operation, a “transcendental attitude. This attitude, explicated in radical hermeneutics, goes beyond the already constituted faith and practice, and focuses on the constitutive conditions for such phenomena: Events are not constituted but are constituting, but they are only found in what is constituted, which serves as their transcendental clue.”32 In explicating this point further, Caputo points to the element external to the subject that is present in the subject’s desire, and thereby to the interplay between the subjective and the external (if not necessarily objective or reified): in the desire he points to, there is an elusive element: in desire, he writes, we open ourselves up to more than the reified thing, to something that is coming or promised, something that might even turn out to be disturbing.33 Thereby, he can characterize further the content of an event. However, to say “content” is misleading: the event is “decisively marked by a certain excess or uncontainability.”34 The transcendental structure of the event entails that “in any (finite) identifiable content, there is contained something that it cannot contain, which is the source of the (infinitival) discontent and the specter of the ‘perhaps’.”35 A CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICAL CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING THE SEMPER MAJOR, CONTINGENCY, AND IMPOSSIBILITY Prayer is a pervasive theme in Caputo’s theology. To highlight this is important because it roots his thinking in a specific practice, a practice that opens up to pondering about our experiences of the world. Prayer can be seen as the context of discovery that allows the theme of God and the impossible to break through and manifest itself. Moreover, it allows us to return to the particular experience of the world that faith manifests. The distinct character of Caputo’s work is that this condition seems to be fundamental for his struggle with God. The practice of prayer (not a dogmatic position or a clearly delineated philosophical or theological conceptualization) causes transcendental reflections about experience, and here emerges in his work the struggle with the notion of God—a struggle that leads to writing in protest against theology as a traditional discipline and as disciplining (in the Foucaultian sense) thinking about God. We cannot get rid of God. Perhaps this is the fundamental experience John Caputo builds on when he writes about his struggle with God, with theologians, with onto-theology. God is, as we say in Norwegian, a pebble in my shoe, something disturbing and in-breaking, or, as I have suggested

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elsewhere, a burglar breaking and entering the comfort zone, being a surprise, or—an event.36 There are two main elements in Caputo’s thinking that point beyond the development of hermeneutical insights that I have shown above that he develops about experience: one is the insistence on affirming the fundamental contingency of what happens. This comes to the fore in his underscoring of the impossibility of God—which can be seen as a protest against the frame where God is encapsulated within onto-theology. When he argues for “philosophical projects that enable us to recover this contingent facticity in order to “restore life to its original difficulty” and to accept the instability of the “flux,””37 this can only be done within the framework of a hermeneutics that is open to the event. No final vocabulary can establish God as a firm ground for life. By pointing to this last theme, in addition to contingency another element in which Caputo seems to agree with tradition is disclosed: God is always semper major—always more and other than what can be contained in both experience and in our concepts. The practice of prayer opens us up to the realization of this fact. From a metaphysical point of view, this means that the actual is not enough to get a grasp of what God is like—God is always more, and the name of God points to possibility just as much as actuality. Thus, there is a fundamental negative element in Caputo’s theology—a point that many have identified. And there are good, critical reasons for maintaining the insights of negative theology—or a theology of reserve—over a traditional theology of glory.38 The consequences that follow from this argumentative trajectory are, however, that experiences of gratitude and grace for how reality presents itself in actuality become less important.39 This negative element corresponds to a topic not discussed in this chapter, namely the messianic. The messianic, the waiting for the one who has not come, allows for the articulation of discontent and protest. It is also the backdrop for my initial comparison of Caputo’s thinking and Leonard Cohen’s poetry. And perhaps discontent is an underlying theme that the Jewish and Christian traditions allow Caputo to articulate. As long as we remain by the present and are not open to and hoping for an event, we have no means for protest and unease, no reason to expect anything more. In the present global situation, that is a profoundly problematic situation. We need to hope for what seems impossible, for that which appears as out of reach. Not because God can intervene and save us from climate change and an increasingly more unstable global situation. But our hope for the impossible, that which the name “God” entails in terms of justice, hospitality, and compassion, is what opens up to events in which such features can manifest themselves as events that disturb “business as usual” by those that want to defer decisions necessary to save the planet from further catastrophe.

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In the silence of prayer, we have to admit that we do not fully know to whom we pray, and for what: God is always other. But this unknown, uncontrollable, possible event would not appear to us as such, had it not been for how our experience of God is mediated by the negation of positive religion. Hence, positive religion, its practices and its theologies, are mediating devices for our experience of God, albeit in negative form, as they contribute to the realization of what is necessary to negate, to suspend, to hypothesize. They are the objective in flux, the “object” of radical hermeneutics, the necessary autre of the experience—not at the content of the experience of God, but the mediator. Radical hermeneutics is not possible without positive religion, but positive religion cannot remain untouched by the radical hermeneutics that opens up to the experience of God.40 In this manner, “the first is already invaded by the second.”41 Concrete hopes are not something to be left behind forever. The apophatic theology and anthropology for which Caputo argues are more relevant politically these days than what one can see from an immediate reading. In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, he suggests that of the humanity, ethics, and politics which are to come, “we cannot say a thing, except that they want to twist free from the regimes of presence, from the historically restricted concepts of humanity, ethics, and politics under which we presently labor.”42 The relevance of these words could not be more apparent than they are in the contemporary global situation: As I write these last lines, a few weeks after the closing of the GOP 26 in Glasgow, we can perhaps see more clearly the potential relevance of what Caputo writes here: The future of humanity is at stake. The political and the ethical instruments we have at hand have proved themselves not to be working. People are protesting in the streets against politicians and corporations that defer radical action and focus on more immediate, presentist topics, being under the spell that climate change can be impeded without having to sacrifice anything serious in the Western consumer societies.43 Caputo himself suggests that what is needed is a theo-praxis, which is explicated and applicated in reconciliatory modes that allow concerted action on climate change to “get into our democratic machines.”44 Facing climate change, he sees all theologies and atheologies as invited to “a practice of nonseparable difference.”45 This notion of nonseparable difference is a profound attempt to recognize how humans are entangled with the rest of creation while still maintaining the differences between the species, and thereby also the necessary responsibility of humans. Against this backdrop, the insistence on hoping for an event, for the impossible, that which for some go under the name God, presents itself. Not that God will help us or save us from climate change, but God will remain the chance for articulating discontent so that we might find other ways—or other ways may present themselves to us, if we look elsewhere than only to the ruling conditions. In this sense, “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of

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hope on a suffering planet in a remote corner of the universe.”46 It is in prayer that we can experience the risk, the promise, and the hope for the impossible that we need to heed the call for an “alarmed and amorous mobilization”47 that counters the suffering and devastation of the planet on which we live.

NOTES 1. If this turns out to be the case, Caputo is closer to traditional thinking about God than it appears, although Bruce E. Benson then assumes that “the ‘weakness’ of Caputo’s God will likely be too weak for many who would identify themselves as Christians.” See Bruce Ellis Benson, “A Continental Perspective,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity, ed. Chad Meister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8. 2. Walter Lowe: “Christianity and Anti-Judaism,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, eds. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 111. with reference to Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1998), 140. 3. Walter Lowe: “Christianity and Anti-Judaism,” 111. with reference to Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 140. 4. Lowe, 140. 5. See John D. Caputo, “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible,” in The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, eds. John D. Caputo and B. Keith Putt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 321–36. Here 321. 6. Caputo, “The Experience of God,” 321. 7. Caputo, “The Experience of God,” 321. 8. Caputo, “The Experience of God,” 321. 9. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edition (New York: Continuum 2004), 296–297. See also J. Risser. “Hermeneutic Experience and Memory: Rethinking Knowledge as Recollection,” Research in Phenomenology 16 (1986): 41–55, 42. 10. Cf. Caputo, “Experience of God,” 110. The topic of dialectic in Caputo is a complicated one, and he is, rightly, critical to it insofar as it restricts openness, freedom, and different outcomes. In EG 110 about his irregular form of Hegelianism and does not want to prioritize the dialectic as a mode of thinking. However, I would nevertheless argue that his own conception of experience and how it opens up to a notion of the impossible would not be possible without some dialectical reflection, but not one that leads to necessary outcomes. 11. Risser, “Hermeneutic Experience,” 45. 12. Caputo, “Experience of God,” 323. 13. Caputo, “Experience of God,” 323. 14. Caputo, “Experience of God,” 323. 15. Cf. the following statement: “In a certain sense, I keep writing one book after another about prayer, which seems to be my only topic.” Caputo, The Insistence of God a Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) 16. 16. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 16.

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17. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 16. 18. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 17. 19. Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 243–263, 249. 20. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices,” 250. 21. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices,” 250. 22. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices,” 250. 23. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 17. 24. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 27. 25. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 31. 26. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 31 27. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 32. 28. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 82. 29. A critical discussion of the distinction between existence and insistence in Caputo is found in Pieter J. Huiser and Rick Benjamins, “Caputo’s Notion of Insistence as an Instance of Existence,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 63 (2021). They argue that instead of making a sharp distinction between them, is it more reasonable to think of insistence as a particular instance of existence. 30. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 82f. 31. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 359. 32. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 83. 33. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 84. 34. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 85. 35. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 85. 36. See Jan-Olav Henriksen, Desire, Gift and Recognition: Christology and Postmodern Theory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 142–144. 37. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1, esp. 36–37, 209, 281. Here quoted after Hartmut von Sass and Eric E. Hall, “Metaphysics, Its Critique, and Post-Metaphysical Theology: An Introductory Essay,” in Groundless Gods. The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought, eds. H. von Sass and E. Hall (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 21. 38. See the subtitle of Caputo’s most recent book: A Theology of Difficult Glory. 39. This is not to say that all experience of the good of creation remains outside the scope of Caputo’s thinking. But it is often with qualifications, or restrictions, or against the negative backdrop of reality as it presents itself to us. See for this, Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 179–181. 40. Caputo, On Religion (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 33: “I am not arguing against confessional faiths but only insisting that they ought to be disturbed from within by a radical not-knowing, by a faith without faith, by a sense of the secret, and that they ought to confess like the rest of us that they do not know who they are.” 41. Caputo The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps, ix. 42. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 56.

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43. Caputo makes important moves toward a non-anthropocentric position that suggests a new cosmology in the last chapters in EG, and considerably more elaborated in John D. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). There, his cosmo-poetics is applied to the challenge of climate change, as well. 44. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 211. 45. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 211. 46. The Insistence of God a Theology of Perhaps, ix. 47. Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, 211.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models : Interventions and Catchwords. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1998. Benson, Bruce Ellis. “A Continental Perspective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity, edited by Chad Meister. Oxford, 2015, online edition. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos. A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Caputo, John D. On Religion. Thinking in Action. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God a Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D., and B. Keith Putt. The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Cohen, Leonard. “You want it darker.” Columbia Music 2016. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 2004. Henriksen, Jan-Olav. Desire, Gift and Recognition: Christology and Postmodern Theory. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Huiser, Pieter J., and Rick Benjamins. “Caputo’s Notion of Insistence as an Instance of Existence.” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 63, no. 3 (2021), 299–315. Lowe, Walter. “Christianity and Anti-Judaism.” In Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, 111–118. New York: Routledge, 2005. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (2002), 243–63. von Sass, Hartmut, and Eric E. Hall, “Metaphysics, Its Critique, and Post-Metaphysical Theology: An Introductory Essay.” In Groundless Gods: The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought, edited by Harmut von Sass and Eric E. Hall. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014.

Response to Henriksen John D. Caputo

Jan-Olav Henriksen has singled out and linked two notions which go right to the heart of what interest me. He is right to say that prayer is a central theme in my work, and then to link prayer with the experience of God. I am very grateful to him for this work and I want only to add to it here a certain asterisk or qualification. While this all sounds quite pious to orthodox ears, it has, in weak or radical theology—“weak” is my version of radical—a rather more anxious, stressful signification. One way to condense what I am arguing is to say that I am trying to defend the possibility of prayer. Like Augustine in the Confessions, like Anselm and other great theologians of the middle ages, I would gladly cast my work, not as an academic treatise in philosophy or theology but as a prayer. But—in deconstruction, s’il y en a, is that there is always a “but”—my prayer would always quasi-Augustinian, slightly atheistic, circum-cut, as Derrida would say, deprived of all the comforts and protection of classical prayer. My prayer would be less a work of edification and more an expression of a restless anxiety. I am not against academic treatises. I have spent a lifetime engaged in producing them. My point is rather to say that weak or radical theology is not only an academic undertaking, not only a matter for debates at scholarly conferences. It is describing a form of life, and life is desire, a prayer and a tear for something, I know not what. So I do not think, as its critics sometimes maintain, that radical theology is a strictly academic undertaking, which is to be distinguished from real religion, where people actually pray. I distinguish instead between confessional prayer, the prayers of a confessional community, with its support system of rites and rituals, prayer books and communal services, where we are never lost for words and everyone knows to whom they are praying, from the prayers of a radical theologian, which are denuded 212

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of all this support and protection, praying in a khora-desert, deserted and desertified, making a more circum-cut prayer. The point of departure for prayer is the restless heart, the cor inquietum of Augustine, but, on the story I am telling, in a radical theological account, we are unable to add, as Augustine does, donec requiescat in te. That resting heart, that heart arrest, that requiescat bears the mark of death, requiescat in pace, whereas prayer is for the living, their hearts still beating, who are ever restless, never at rest, except in death. The first, last, and constant prayer in weak theology is viens, oui, oui, yes to the coming of the impossible, to the coming of what we cannot see coming. Yes to the to-come, à-venir, l’avenir, the future, yes, I said yes, as Molly Bloom said. That open-ended, expectant hope, that hope against hope, the very idea of the to-come—that is the structure of experience. By experience I do not mean the tick-tock of ordinary time, the safe, homogenous, humdrum succession of now-points, but the qualitative, intensive expectancy that is the mark of life, of exposure to the coming of what we cannot see coming, that puts itself at risk, in order to let the future come. Experience is not measured extensively, by counting up now-points, but intensively, by the intensity of its exposure to the event. That is why I like to say, as Henriksen shows, that experience in the maximal sense is beautifully figured in the theological image of the experience of God. But here the name of God is not the name of a Supreme Being, but the name of the event, of the possibility of the impossible. The name of God is the name of the greatest intensity, the most intensive point in experience, where the greatest stress is put on experience, pushing it to the limits, beyond the possible to the impossible. Experience is the name of the place in which that intensity takes place. It is only in the experience of God, in this sense, that experience is really experience, and it is only in the God of experience that God is really God. That does not turn experience into some subjective buzz and God into a fiction. On the contrary, the experience of God is a precious theopoetic figure of the way we resonate with the world, of the tune the world is playing on us, of the way the world is “worlding,” as Heidegger says, in and through us. So I am very grateful for Henkriksen’s work, which has underlined something that could not be more important to me.

Part IV

RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 10

Radical Theology’s Place within Theology Justin Sands

John Caputo’s radical theology argues that the spirit of theology must be lived and enacted to be confessional. It is not enough to profess a doxology or adhere to a creed, one’s fidelity should be to the event that stirs underneath such statements and, for such a fidelity to happen, one must enact that event— as best as one can—in pursuit of understanding the depths within the event itself. The question becomes, then, how does one do this? For Caputo, the possibility of doing this happens within his three principles: The Protestant Principle (semper reformanda), the Jewish Principle (semper deconstruenda), and the Catholic Principle (cool Latin title yet to be given!).1 I will detail these principles in what follows, but for our purposes my question is not so much how one conceptualizes this enactment, but about its performativity. Indeed, having deeply engaged Caputo’s work in Belgium, where I received my doctorate, and having taught his work in South Africa, where I currently live and work, my fellow peers and students have often asked, “where can we place Caputo’s work on the spectrum of theology?” This is not a simple question of pigeonholing his work as “fundamental theology,” or “contextual theology,” or (heaven forbid!) as “systematic theology.” It is mainly a question, again, about performativity: where and how does it operate within the theological discourse? In prior work, I have argued that Caputo’s radical theology inhabits the discourse of theology to better critique its contents (i.e., doctrine, Tradition), and I would like to press further in this chapter: how does Caputo’s work relate to other theologies, how could his work be received by—and in turn influence—other theological practices and disciplines? 2 In this sense, Caputo’s radical theology works as a strong critique against the doctrinal certainty pronounced by the institutional church(es) as well as the onto-theological pronouncements one sees within professional theology. On the one hand, Caputo has a layman’s touch when dissecting the politics 217

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of religion (both in the pews and the pulpits) in works like What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (2007), Hoping Against Hope (2015), and In Search of a Radical Theology (2020). On the other, Caputo presents himself as a deft academic who is quick to dismantle the reasons why “no one trusts theology” in his academic works. To my mind, he inhabits the worlds of both pastoral and fundamental theology quite well and brings them into dialogue in nearly all his writings.3 Yet still, his radical theology intends a space for itself rather than joining (or, rather, clearing away) other subdisciplines and discourses. He touches upon liberation and contextual theology, for example, but he never states that his theology is either of those. Why is this, I ponder? I think that it comes down to his ultimate aims with a radical theology: it is a pursuit of justice, but it can only arrive at this telos by first questioning what justice is, what is it founded upon, and how does this inform our understanding of faith as both concept and deed. To be sure, a contextual theology asks similar questions but operates from experience (hence, contextual) and then extrapolates from that a theology. Caputo’s radical theology at once deconstructs the context and the theology that either informs the context or develops from it; as such, his work is better suited as a fundamental interrogation of the conditions of a theology, but with an eye toward praxis. This means that it can dialogue with such theologies, but it cannot really be a contextual or liberation theology. By its own design (and from its own influences: Derrida, Levinas, Tillich, Eckhart, etc.) a radical theology is more conceptual than practical, this is perhaps why Caputo often locates its parasitic character. In what follows, though, I will test these designs and its character by exploring the mechanics of a radical theology, ultimately exploring its function and its limits. The goal of this is to show how Caputo’s work can be received into other theological discourses in pursuit of understanding the ways in which Caputo’s radical theology can enact the justice for which it insists. To gather our orientation, I will begin by giving a brief overview of the three principles within radical theology and how they coalesce into a theopoetics. From there, I will scrutinize the limits and contours of a radical theology to arrive at a partial understanding of how it relates to other theologies. The upshot of this is both a better understanding of where a radical theology exists within the spectrum of theological discourses, and a stronger understanding of the ways in which justice and liberation undergird all theologies (or at least should). CAPUTO’S THREE PRINCIPLES: A RADICAL THEOLOGY IN MEDIAS RES Caputo presents his three principles as a corrective to the concept of a supreme God.4 For Caputo, God is not a sovereign being who rules from

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above and is in control of everything. The opening chapters of The Weakness of God is a clearing away of this metaphysical deity who is at once in charge of everything and therefore responsible for everything. In retort to this metaphysical construct, Caputo argues that “the name of God is an event, or rather it harbors an event, and . . . theology is the hermeneutics of that event, its task being to release that name, to set it free, to give it its own head, and thereby to head off the forces that would prevent this event.”5 Resultantly, theology runs contrary to its mission, Caputo argues, when it would rather retreat to the comfort and security that this so-called omnipotent divinity provides. In so doing, it seeks to contain the event rather than follow where it insists that we should go. He continues this line of reasoning by emphasizing a Tillich and Eckhart inspired atheism to reject this false security. Here, Caputo’s atheism presents a philosophical argument, but, more importantly, it also holds a deeply spiritual sentiment. Spiritually, this lack of (metaphysical) comfort leaves the believer in crisis, which we will return to in the final section. Importantly, ever since The Weakness of God Caputo has used this atheism as starting point in his work, which has a recursive effect where it deepens its sentiments upon each retelling. In The Insistence of God, for example, Caputo deepens his “atheism” by positing that God insists upon us rather than existing in its own right. This insistent God, absent a direct ontology, is deeply tied to our innate sense of justice where the event upon which we name “God” compels us to question ourselves and society.6 It obliges us to ask, “is this what justice looks like?”, “are we really continuing the sentiments and works of Yeshua, or are we really doing this for ourselves?” In philosophical terms, these reflective questions instigate an auto-deconstructive exercise, whereby the concepts which inspire our personal and collective actions cannot be statically held for too long. They rupture as they ossify into our conspired, rigid pronouncements of our own righteousness and glory.7 In theological terms, and returning to Caputo’s statement about theology itself, they cannot hold onto the name of God since the event always slips past them; though institutions (church and academy) and persons always try, the events harbored in these proclamations of righteousness never remain stable. In both senses, it is important to note that Caputo is not trying to create a system or framework for pursuing divine justice. There is no programmable code that Caputo can merely implement into theology, philosophy, or even Christianity writ large. Rather, Caputo is locating how the event of God challenges and inspires the world in spite of what we do with that word or to our world. This is one of the reasons why Caputo’s theology functions theologically: he is not systematizing our beliefs to make them comprehensible, he is locating how those beliefs develop by upending themselves, rupturing from within, because every definition or name of the event is obsolete as soon as

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it is uttered—at least at first. Importantly, though, one of the transitions from a weak theology to a radical theology is that the former locates this weak messianism—this rupture from within our discourses about God—whereas the latter pushes further than a locative exercise. Radical theology does this by holding a stronger, more activist bent. I will detail this further below, but in simplistic terms, Caputo’s weak theology is still trying to understand this event-name relation, whereas a radical theology is more (un)sure of itself by embracing this relationship through active participation within and through the event itself, absent its name. In short, radical theologians need to be activists of some sort, and their activism is always through and with an event to which they can only, at best, partially understand. Though some would call this an epistemic humility, I think that it is much better understood as an epistemic mystery; something more similar to Augustine’s reflection upon God than a poststructuralist reflection upon language. Returning to our task of describing the fundamental principles of Caputo’s theology, his critique directly confronts a self-assured Christendom. This confrontation does not operate from the outside of Christendom, but from within the world created by Christendom. This is why Caputo’s later work often uses American-centric examples such as the “What Would Jesus Do?” phenomenon. In a sense, his theology employs Christendom’s own constructs against itself, again rupturing from within rather than from outside (or even worse, from on high). He does this by emphasizing two primary principles, The Protestant Principle of semper reformanda and the Jewish Principle of semper deconstruenda. These principles, Caputo claims, are the best descriptions we have of how the event of God beyond a given name operates to upend the titles, proclamations, and justifications given to it: On Tillich’s telling, semper reformanda means that nothing finite and conditional can ever be adequate to the infinite and unconditional, which stands in constant judgment over anything finite and conditional—including religion, including even the Protestant one. Derrida proposes his own deconstructive and—let’s say—Jewish Principle, let’s say semper deconstruenda: no construction can ever be adequate to the undeconstructible and so every construction stands under constant judgment by the undeconstructible. Nothing that exists is ever adequate to the pressure of the call of what is being called for. No finite and conditional form must ever be confused with what is being called for.8

Caputo will eventually add to these two a third, The Catholic Principle, which he states is “the principle of historicality and temporality, materiality and carnality.”9 The Catholic Principle addresses the notion that even if revelation as we know it is closed, its reception into our lives is always proceeding—the

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Church is always in medias res—and our mission as Church and individual believer is to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth, through word but especially through deed. As he states, “The church, like any tradition, does not have a history, it is a history.”10 In sum, what these principles provide is both a description and directive: The first two describe how the event always exceeds and absconds from our declarations placed upon the divine, the third describes how this absconding manifests itself in and through history, which reveals its activist nature in the sense that these are not merely pronouncements or declarations, they are realtime movements seen through our actions as a people of faith. If this is so, and we remain vigilantly aware that the event compels us while always remaining ahead of us, then we can better calibrate the trajectory that our works (deeds performed in the name of this event) take toward bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth; and better articulate our theology (reflection upon those deeds and the event which leads them) crafted from these works. In a sense, and I imagine by design, Caputo is not saying anything new here. One can easily see similar notions in the Gospels, the epistles of James, and throughout the history of the Church. For instance, I think there is an interesting dialogue to be had between Caputo and Yves Congar’s notion of the Holy Spirit. What is radical is not a new form of theology, but the focus upon the radical nature of the divine event which was always already there; a radical theology clears away the metaphysical and doctrinal pronouncements to remind itself that the event-of-what-we-call-God is what was radical all along. And, importantly, that this event need not be merely spoken, it must be performed. Through these principles, Caputo’s theological critiques fully come to form; they shed their parasitic character to instigate action, to enact the lessons learned from self-critique, and thus—in and through their activism—they create and become their own history. The importance of the Catholic Principle to a radical theology is that it is only through a rigorous interrogation of our history (or histories) that we are able to push further to the unconditional; the “unconditional” meaning that which always interrogates the conditions we press upon the divine through naming it. The next step in his mechanics is to address how these principles operate to become both the instigation of praxis and a reflection upon this praxis in hopes of creating better, more just, more robust action in the future. THEOPOETICS AS THEOPRAXIS: RADICAL THEOLOGY’S MECHANICS All three principles coalesce into a theopoetics. What differentiates Caputo’s concept of a theopoetics from others, say, Richard Kearney’s reading of the

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concept, is that it is more than a hermeneutics of retrieval or a means of unconcealing the unsaid within an utterance. For Caputo, I find at least, a theopoetics is a mode of living. In this sense, it is entirely confessional: As a theology focused on the insistence of the event, radical theology represents a way to get at something spooking confessional theology, some specter of the “perhaps” transpiring in theology that haunts the halls of theology, all the while calling for a new species of theologian. To the old species of theologian, radical theology looks like it is just playing around with theological language; to a radical theologian, the old species of theologian looks like someone afraid of the dark. Radical theology, the becoming radical of confessional theology, feels about in the dark for something the old theologians would just as soon keep under wraps, something that steals over them in an idle moment, a thought that perhaps all this really is through a glass, in the dark, and perhaps the darkness goes all the way down.11

Addressing how theopoetics operates, Caputo states: I invoke theopoetics in order to explain the discursive shape, the grammatological genre required by radical theology. The “radical” in radical theology goes to the roots of classical theology and uproots them, pulling up by the root the logos of the old theology and replacing it with a poetics. In the process it uproots its piety, its celestial demeanor, along with the mythological and quasi-gnostic drift of its logos, exposing it to the events that underlie and undermine it. Or, to put it another way, the old “logos” of theology is replaced with “events,” which are addressed by a poetics, not a logic.12

What I think he means by this is that a theopoetics acknowledges something deeper stirring within humanity, something which we perhaps call the divine, which can reveal something about our own nature. A theopoetics is happy to revel in mystery; it wants to feel the event, to participate in it, rather than to accurately describe it. Therefore it needs to be lived.13 Furthermore, I think that a theopoetics is more existential than people acknowledge: it needs to enact the justice within the event, then to reflect upon this enactment, then deconstruct it in pursuit of greater enaction. So, while a theopoetics is certainly a hermeneutic in that it is an interpretative concept, it can only arrive at interpretation through participation. One could even say through communal participation whereby the “theopoet” does not retreat inwardly, but rather expands their understanding of the event through co-creative action in pursuit of bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth. Justice, the best word for what he means concerning the bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, cannot be created individually or in one’s own fashion (this would be fascism, plain and simple). It needs a community.

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Here, one can see the interplay between the three principles: (1) We must recognize that whatever we declare in the name of God rests upon shaky ground which needs to be tilled to unearth better means to understand our relationship to the event which is harbored in divine names and doctrines (Protestant Principle), (2) we can arrive at that through a critical investigation of the ways in which we sense this relationship and proclaim it—the closer sense of truth is always already within the so-called truths we profess (Jewish Principle), (3) we not only investigate this through our speech but through our communal engagement in and through history—this requires participation and enacting the truths we proclaim even while we seek more authentic, more just notions within said truths (Catholic Principle). Finally and in the process—whether harmonious or discordant—we employ a theopoetics to gather our sense of communion with the event harbored in the divine names to which we attach or place upon said event. As Caputo states: The rigor of radical theology, the test of a theology worthy of its name, is to maintain itself strictly in the element of a theopoetics. Poetics is the rigor of weak theology, its discipline, its asceticism, its crown of thorns, its strictest hewing of the word to the matter to be thought, the way it follows the way of the cross.14

One could say that a radical theology’s use of theopoetics, and the principles employed to articulate it, fashion a fundamental theology because it interrogates the conditions of possibility for any theological utterance. As fundamental theology, it questions the very nature of theological reasoning and reflection. In another sense, the fact that radical theology requires—insists even—an engagement with both a local and global community in pursuit of justice (Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth) places it closer to liberation theologies, if not contextual ones. One also could be content with mainly naming radical theology as a form of political theology since the work of Metz, Sölle, and Moltmann also challenged the foundations of Christian theology from the view of what type of worlds (and sense of justice) it supports. Yet what separates a radical theology is that Caputo never clearly demonstrates that this sense of justice arises out of Christianity; meaning that he is more than a little suspicious of the notion that Christ crucified is the apotheosis of justice and that it is our theological task to better understand and articulate that justice to the world.15 It just seems a bit too neat for him; a bit too easily co-opted to justify further suffering or to reframe prior suffering as just participation in the passion of Jesus Christ. Rather, I think that he sees where we can read into the life and teachings of Yeshua our own prayers and tears; he sees where the Cross can insist and instill a sense of alleviating those tears in pursuit of greater flourishing (not

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just for humans, but for the cosmos writ large). However, when we mistake our reading for the event itself (labeling it, naming it, as it were), then we need to step back and deconstruct the conditionals we have placed upon Jesus’ life and words, his deeds and teachings.16 When he argues that Yeshua could never make sense of the Council of Nicaea his intent, I imagine, is to show that Christianity could easily pass away and the event would still carry on.17 The justice which stirs out of the event does not need the metaphysics of Christianity to happen, it will insist nonetheless.18 We need to be aware of our contingency, basically, and that we are the stewards of this world, not its creator nor its master. For Caputo, there is nothing inherently special about Christianity, in the sense of intellectual or revelatory superiority. Rather, it is the event which makes Christianity meaningful in any sense of the word. I would imagine that, for Caputo, political theology hews too close to rediscovering the principles of revelation within Christianity; the principles “only” seen within the Cross and the Crucified. Caputo backs away from this notion after Weak Theology, which does indebt its discourse to reflections of the passion narrative’s sense of justice. Yet in The Insistence of God, just to show one important example, he closes his reflection upon the divine and our relation to it with a cosmology.19 He embraces a Hegelian notion of development to show how our actions create our world rather than revealing a transcendental ethos that was always already there. This goes back to his notion that “no one trusts theology” because theology far too easily shows that the answers to our problems were always God, always some transcendence or transcendental signifier which we merely needed to rediscover or tap into. Here, he shows how insignificant Christianity is in the larger guise of the universe and what we know of its history: Christianity is and was for us; us humans born at a given time. It is not the be-all-end-all ideal for justice, nor will it be the last word on justice. Perhaps this is why it is futile to try and locate radical theology on the spectrum of theological discourses: it is more interested in the radical nature which stirs underneath theology than it is interested in any actual discipline of theology. In addition to this potential futility, I think that employing a radical theology as a liberation theology would become exhausting! Always remaining in the accusative while enacting liberative justice could easily slip into a paralytic; where every action not only holds a critique, but a critique of the critique, which then holds another critique and critique of the critique, and so on. Radical theology’s theopoetic nature is too critical of itself, at times, to be a plausible programmatic for justice. Moreover, a radical theology could very easily slip into a new form of fundamentalism or puritanism, where the radical theologian would constantly critique others’ imperfect pursuit of justice and therefore become an impediment to enacting justice. Of course, this is

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not Caputo’s intent, but this is also one of the reasons why we should find the limits of radical theology and its methodology. It is one of the reasons why locating its place among theology, as potentially futile as that may be, is an important exercise and why I pursue this course nonetheless.

WHAT RADICAL THEOLOGY DOES AS A THEOLOGY As I mentioned in the introduction, Caputo’s theology eschews the comfort that a metaphysics or traditional theology supplies. In its stead, Caputo calls for us to be placed into the accusative, to always recognize that our utterances are conditional, to always know that there is a greater justice ahead of our actions in the name and pursuit of bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth. For me, this leaves the believer in crisis; in a constant state of questioning their beliefs and actions. While I find this to be a great and valuable process as a mode of reflection (for theology and otherwise), as a daily mode of living it would either create chronic anxiety, depression, or worse. This is one of the reasons why I think a radical theology is more conceptual than practical. It also harkens back to the old quip Westphal had about Caputo’s theology, that it is a “thin soup” and not nourishing for the believing soul.20 One of the ways in which political, liberation, and contextual theologies find nourishment in their pursuit of justice is through their reflection upon salvation and what it means to us living in the day-to-day. For far too long, salvation has been a means to excuse or accept injustice in our world since a perfect—and perfectly just—world exists beyond this one. Recently, and to great results, theologians have come to dissect the effects of this soteriology and its blockade toward our pursuits of a better church and a better personal life of faith.21 The soteriologies found in the works of theologians such as Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, to give just two examples, become the focal point for enacting justice in our world and form the “liberation” within a liberation theology.22 Yet Caputo, perhaps following Kierkegaard, is uneasy about any sense of salvation in the soteriological sense; there is no comfort of heaven even as we bring about its so-called kingdom. He cannot rest—and indeed this is the exhaustion—in the fact that our works have salvific merit for a world beyond this one. Rather, their salvation lies within living in a more just world. Our salvation is without true salvific election, without the comfort of being “saved” in any political or intellectual sense of the word; his is truly a salvation without (sans) the comfort of “salvation.”23 If one looks at radical theology as a form of liberation theology, then, I can see why it is a “thin soup.” If someone like Westphal thinks that “all theology should be a liberation theology” but also robustly proclaim its works in

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the name of a given reflection upon revelation, then I can see where a radical theology might fail as a modality of faith.24 Furthermore, if thinkers like Stephen Minister and J. Aaron Simmons take a more fundamental theological perspective and want Caputo to determine what religion and its praxis “is” or “should be” (and hence, want a determinative theology), then I can see why they find a radical theology wanting.25 However, I think the primary issue here is that neither of these critiques adequately understands what a radical theology is trying to do and how radical theologians perceive themselves. Although Caputo claims a “parasitic” nature to his theology (or theologies, if you distantiate a weak theology from a radical one), I see it more as a supplanting of systematic theology than anything. If we take systematic (or dogmatic) theology to be a discipline where mostly professional theologians examine and structure doctrines and dogmas from their fundamental principles, and order or accord them to the practical concerns within the church, then we most clearly see Caputo’s critique against theology and what he distrusts the most. For sure, systematic theology has had a necessary role to get the Catholic Principle to where it is—that is, to maintain and articulate Christianity as a tradition—but that role is too outsized—too authoritative—within the life of faith. Its antithesis is not an a-systematization of theology, but a rediscovery of what stirs theology to begin with. Its antithesis need not negate everything, to obliterate everything uttered by theology. Rather, its antithesis must preserve the very spirit which compelled these utterances in the first place. A radical theology truly is Hegelian in its operation. Therefore, and I humbly offer this over to Caputo to reject or reformulate, a radical theology’s modus operandi is to provoke the Aufhebung—or the sublation—of the spirit which was always already stirring within theology. With an eye toward praxis, radical theology reflects upon the justice performed in the name of God and dissects how these actions may be used to bring about the justice to come. With an eye toward the declarations made based upon these performances, radical theology seeks better understandings of what these declarations mean and what they entail; what they justify. Radical theology is not the undoing of theology, it is the upbuilding of theology, within theology, knowing that theology itself is only tangential to the event which provokes its utterances, its legitimacy, and its performativity through its own history. Recall that radical theology is not trying to do something new, it is trying to rediscover or reconnect with what was already there. As a result of this, radical theologians do not stand in opposition to theology as a discipline. They are not fundamentalist or puritanical in the sense that they only present critiques, critiques of the critiques, and then critiques of the critiques of the critiques, to those trying to enact justice in the best way that they know how. Rather, they stand in communion with them in face of the epistemic mystery

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which undergirds any and all theological methods. As a theological method, which I think it is, radical theology attempts a wholistic account of theology—from its foundations to its doctrines, to its practical concerns—through a re-examination of what theologians, Christian institutions, and personal believers perceive as the totality of their faith. It employs its three principles (and various ideas within those principles, such as deconstruction) in pursuit of this re-examination. Among the theological discourses and other theological methods, radical theology does not attempt to create a separate history, it rather attempts to bring about a catholic history—small “c”—whereby the community gathered in the name of Yeshua can further participate in fulfilling his life and deeds, can better understand his life and teachings. It needs to be a separate discourse because radical theology seeks to instigate or propel the Aufhebung which it finds necessary for unfolding the history of the Church’s reception of revelation, for building the Kingdom of Heaven, here on earth. Finally, it is distinct as a method but integrated within the larger theological discourse because it requires others to play their respective roles within this historical event. It cannot do it on its own—this is why Caputo first acknowledged a parasitic nature and, more to the point, pronouncing radical theology as a superior form of theology would undercut its entire ethos. Nor does radical theology want to do it on its own since it seeks a more just communion between believers and their world, between the worlds built among humanity, between our worlds and the cosmos, between the name of God and the event which stirs within that name.

AN OPEN-ENDED CONCLUSION What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to explore the role radical theology plays within the overall theological discourse. As I mentioned before, my prior work argued that radical theology inhabits the discourse of theology while critiquing its contents and it must inhabit this discourse—be confessional—in order to do so. It cannot be a philosophy of religion, it needs to be a theology. Here, I have tried to examine what that actually means. I did so by first articulating the mechanics of radical theology and how they coalesce into a theopoetics. From that, I extrapolated what radical theology looks like as a theological method. The goal in doing this is to understand “why” a radical theology intends a place among extant theological methods, disciplines, and so forth; why do we need a radical theology and why is it not just a new or offshoot approach within existing theologies. The final section tries to give some contours (if not definitions) to radical theology as a method, focusing on how its sublative nature instills a sense of communion

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within the broader theological discourse rather than being an outlier or separatist critique of the discourse itself. Radical theology’s future is something that I have been considering for a while now, and that really underlies this entire chapter. Though Jack Caputo is certainly a personality, I know that the furthest thing from his intentions is to create a cult of personality whereby all radical theology’s roads lead back to him. He’s not Heidegger, and I find that Heidegger’s arrogance is one of the reasons why Caputo wrote Demythologizing Heidegger and began backing away from such a totalizing philosophy in the first place. All of this is to say, Caputo wants radical theology to not be his “legacy” or something he founded, he wants radical theology to have meaning beyond his own name. He too is conditional to its operation. He too will have to be deconstructed to get at what is unconditionally moving within radical theology. This is one of the reasons why I took pains to say “radical theology” rather than “Caputo’s. . . .” Though sometimes they overlap, there will be a time when they grow apart (if the process has not started already). Part of this deconstruction is understanding the operative nature of radical theology. Understanding it as its own method, putting radical theology as a discipline into the accusative not just from its critics, but into the accusative from what it says about itself. Radical theology is ongoing, it is open-ended toward an eschaton that may never come (or may not come as we understand it), and its radicality will always exceed anything called a radical theology. Knowing how a radical theology acquits itself while being in the accusative will open it to further intellectual and practical developments beyond our own anticipation. We just to to recognize this when it happens, and then deconstruct it. NOTES 1. I’d propose semper idem, but I’m sure Caputo would regret taking up its historical baggage. 2. See Justin Sands, “Confessional Discourses, Radicalizing Traditions: On John Caputo and the Theological Turn,” Open Theology 8 (2022), 1–12. 3. This includes works such as Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). I have found that many theologians think that Caputo’s work only “really began” with The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida and The Weakness of God. Though there is a transition happening during this period—from explicit philosopher of religion to explicit theologian (although weakly)—one can read back into his pre-2000 writings a struggling with the concerns that only become clear in the present day. For a good overview of how one can see these struggles at their headwaters, see Caputo and Michael Zimmerman’s exchange: Michael E. Zimmerman, “John D. Caputo: A postmodern, prophetic, liberal American in Paris,” Continental

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Philosophy Review 31 (1998), 195–214; John Caputo, “An American and a Liberal: John D. Caputo’s response to Michael Zimmerman,” Continental Philosophy Review 21 (1998), 215–220. See also Stefan Stofanik’s The Adventure of Weak Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), where Stofanik explores the varying “roles” and voices Caputo inhabits within his work. 4. Although this is plain to see, notice The Folly of God’s argumentative structure to gather how these principles directly address the critique of onto-theology (or, in a broader set of terms, the notion of a supreme God). John Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016). As a sidenote, I think The Folly of God is something of a “forgotten book” in Caputo scholarship. It has the clearest, most teachable description of Caputo’s intentions with a radical theology and deserves more academic attention than we give it. 5. John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2. 6. John Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 7, 15–17, 36–40, 49, 247. 7. This is the intellectual thrust behind a weak theology, where—following Walter Benjamin (and Derrida’s reading of Benjamin)—the breaking of a concept or canon comes from within itself (i.e., from a weakness within) rather than from outside of itself or from on high (as one would see through a sheer force of strength). This is best described by Caputo in early sections of The Weakness of God (pp. 7–9, 32–36). 8. Caputo, The Folly of God, 21–22, page numbers are approximations (see Ch. 2, “The Unconditional”). 9. John Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 51. 10. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology, 53. 11. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 62 12. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 63. 13. Caputo gives a stronger, more direct explanation of this in In Search of Radical Theology, especially 146–154. 14. Caputo. Cross and Cosmos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019, Kindle Edition) Kindle Locations 2589–2592 (Ch 6). 15. In Cross and Cosmos, Caputo engages political and liberation theology’s emphasis on Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection as the locus for understanding our own suffering (and theology’s aim of addressing this suffering). In response to this approach, Caputo, though he is appreciative of the works of Sobrino, Sölle and others, thinks “that the main problem is the ineradicable gap between the victory wrought by Christ on the cross and the daily defeat of the poor and the persecuted on the streets, the gap, as James Cone puts it . . . between redemption and liberation. Either way, hidden or not, Luther or Anselm, Christus Victor or penal atonement, evil continues to flourish and shows no sign of abating. The powers and the principalities pay no mind, defeated or not—and Christus Victor looks like that army ridiculed by Kierkegaard, which marches up to the battlefield, declares itself victorious, and then marches home in glory without so much as having gotten off a shot” (Kindle Locations 1957–1962).

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16. You can see a slight transition between how Caputo speaks of Jesus’ passion in Weak Theology and later in Cross and Cosmos. It is beyond the scope to do a comparative reading here, but exploring Caputo’s shift in reading the life of Yeshua/Jesus is one project worth undertaking. 17. See also: Caputo, In Search of a Radical Theology, 121–123, 126, 129–132. 18. In Cross and Cosmos’ Caputo agrees with Delores Williams’ reading of Jesus: “[Delores Williams] treats the resurrection as an emblem, a figure, a symbol, a Vorstellung of something of unconditional importance in this world. That is what I am analyzing under the notion of an event of which we should make ourselves worthy, of a call to which we should be the response, of an insistence for which we should supply the existence. She resists speaking of an exchange of this life for another, a view that I think rests on a fundamentally mythic construction of this world and the next, a world in space and time and a ‘world behind the scenes,’ as Levinas calls it.” Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, Kindle Locations 2370–2374. Emphasis Caputo’s. 19. Caputo, The Insistence of God, chapter 8, “The Insistence of the World.” See also: Caputo, Cross and Cosmos, chapter 9, “Deus Absonditus: A God Who Deconstructs Himself in His Ipseity,” where Caputo likewise talks about a “cosmo-theology.” 20. The debates between Westphal and Caputo on this matter are well-worn territory, so I chose just to touch upon them here rather than give a detailed exploration. I cover this aspect of Westphal’s thinking extensively in chapter 6, “Faith Seeking Understanding: Westphal’s Postmodernism,” in Reasoning From Faith: Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 21. See, for example, Darlene Fozard Weaver’s “Sin and the Subversion of Ethics: Why the Discourse of Sin Is Good for Theological Anthropology,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey (New York: T&T Clark, 2021). This is a handbook text meant to give to students and I highlight it because it shows how this concept has moved beyond a critique made by a handful of theologians and has become a mainstream or normative critique of soteriology and social sin. 22. See Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology, translated by Paul Burns, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987). 23. Caputo often returns to Derrida’s notion of “the sans” or “with/out” as a core component to understanding the event-name relation. Here, I am stretching it—perhaps too far, but perhaps not far enough—to summarize how I read Caputo’s take on soteriology. I gather this from his recent works, but especially from The Insistence of God, 92–97. 24. Merold Westphal, “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,” Modern Theology 8:3 (1992), 246. I cover this aspect of Westphal’s thinking extensively in Chapter 6, “Faith Seeking Understanding: Westphal’s Postmodernism” in Reasoning From Faith: Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 25. See J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (eds.), Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Towards a Religion with Religion (Pittsburg: Duquesne

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University Press, 2012). In this book, Caputo gives a direct response to their critiques but reprises his response in In Search of a Radical Theology, devoting much of chapter 5 “On Not Settling for an Abridged Edition of Postmodernism” to their critique.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boff, Leonardo, and Clodovis Boff. Introducing Liberation Theology, Paul Burns, trans. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987. Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Caputo, John D. “An American and a Liberal: John D. Caputo’s Response to Michael Zimmerman.” Continental Philosophy Review 21 (1998), 215–220. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Kindle Edition, 2019. Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, and Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Sands, Justin. “Confessional Discourses, Radicalizing Traditions: On John Caputo and the Theological Turn.” Open Theology 8 (2022), 1–12. Sands, Justin. Reasoning from Faith: Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Simmons, J. Aaron, and Stephen Minister, eds. Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Towards a Religion with Religion. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Stofanik, Stefan. The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D. Caputo through Biographies and Events. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Weaver, Darlene Fozard. “Sin and the Subversion of Ethics: Why the Discourse of Sin is Good for Theological Anthropology.” In T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey. New York: T&T Clark, 2021. Westphal, Merold. “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task.” Modern Theology 8 (1992), 241–261. Zimmerman, Michael. “John D. Caputo: A Postmodern, Prophetic, Liberal American in Paris.” Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998), 195–214.

Response to Sands John D. Caputo

Justin Sands has done the one thing I always hope for when I read papers written about my work. I learn something. Of course, I learn a lot from being criticized either because I have gotten something wrong or I put things in such a way as to invite misunderstanding, and then I spend a lot of time clearing up the confusion or issuing a patch on what I said. But Sands sets that approach aside, settles himself inside my texts and their logic, and explains them back to me in a way that I find enlightening. One thing I see from what Sands is saying, for example, is that “weak” theology is a specifically biblical version (going back to 1 Cor 1) of “radical” theology, which is a broader category and can take many other forms, with or without the biblical traditions, with or without “religion.” Sands asks, what is the “place” of radical theology relative to confessional theology? This is exactly the right question. Once we can place it, we can see what it is up to—and whether it can live with confessional theology and whether confessional theology can put up with it. My own hypothesis is that being a radical theologian is the best way to be a confessional theologian—so long as you do not lose your job, which belongs in the “many a true word is said in jest” category. Sands asks, Is there a room in the theological mansion for radical theology? Is it fundamental theology, contextual theology, liberation theology? Is it just a critique that washes its hands of conventional theology? Or a rival theology, a competitor which seeks to replace the existing theologies? For Sands, it is, beyond doctrine or institution, an enactment, a response, participation, justice—“Deconstruction is justice,” Derrida said. It is, Sands says, a “pastoral” theology and, I would add form of spirituality and prayer.1 It is an entire “form of life” or mode of being-in-the-world, an open-ended affirmation, not only of the good (justice) but of the mystery of the true and the bonds of the beautiful, of the whole length and breadth of the promise of the world, of the mysterium tremendum. 232

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This Sands shows by means of my little riff on Tillich’s “Protestant Principle”—semper reformanda, whatever form theological traditions take is conditional and in need of being reformed in the light of the unconditional. To this, in the interests of inter-faith fairness, I add two more: the Jewish Principle: semper deconstruenda (à la Derrida), every theological construction is deconstructible and subject to the judgment of the undeconstructible, and the “Catholic Principle,” which is tradition itself, what is being transmitted, which Tillich identified but did not call a principle, which was a mistake. I did not supply a Latin motto for that, so Sands suggests semper idem. Not bad. Maybe better: semper idem, semper differens, everywhere itself, everywhere diversified. Maybe best of all: semper venienda, always to come, always promised, never arrived (and this in virtue of the first two principles). Taken together the three principles are describing the auto-deconstructibility of theological tradition, as a self-assembling, self-disassembling, self-correcting multiplicity, an endlessly re-translatable, ongoing process of historicizing, which is the work of a spectral Spirit. On these terms, “Christianity” does not have an “essence,” it has a history, and it does not have a history, it is its history, and its history is the ongoing auto-deconstructibility of what is being transmitted in the tradition. So the question raised by Sands is, can confessional theology live with that? Ubi Spiritus/spectrum, ibi ecclesia. Why, we might ask, is everything so restless? Because of the event. What is the event? The memory and the promise that is carried by a given name, like the name of Jesus, or God, or justice—or any name, in any tradition, that carries elemental import. What is the event? The event is the coming of what we cannot see coming, the open-endedness of the future, of which we dream, for which we pray (be careful what you pray for!). In its most pointed formulation, the event is a way of signaling the “possibility of the impossible”—which in a theology of the event goes under the name of “God”—of the inbreaking shattering of our horizon of expectation, of what we thought was possible. The event is that in the tradition which makes the tradition ever restless, semper inquietum. The event is the restless heart that is constantly astir in theology. It is its cor inquietum, the restless heart that is beating inside the names that occupy our waking attention. So then, where is the event? As Sands shows, right there, inside theology, not outside theology, nolite foras ire, where it does not spell the death of God or theology but its life. There it is, alive and well, stirring beneath the radar of confessional theology. It is not the enemy of theology, not attacking theology, not a competitor but a companion, like a ghost spooking theology. It is a way of thinking about (and living in) a theological tradition by thinking with it and not against it, thinking within it, not scrutinizing or correcting it from above or attacking it from the outside. Radical theology is the “becoming radical” of any given (existing, historical) confessional theology—that is why I call it parasitic. Without the

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confessional-historical traditions, it would have nothing to radicalize. That is why Sands is right to say that radical theology needs to be a theology; it cannot be a (continental) “philosophy of religion,” or a “philosophical theology”—although these are, I think, the masks it wears to work itself into curriculum of “secular” universities, like the knight of faith who looks like a tax collector. But—that is a candidate for a definition of deconstruction (there’s always a “but”)—the event is also a specter, not a Heilige Geist but a ghost, all the while spooking it, spectralizing theology. The spectrality radical theology confers upon theology means its characteristic beliefs (say, in the “existence of God”) are iconic symbols (Tillich), imaginative figurations or Vorstellungen (Hegel) or as I would say the work of a theopoetic imagination, so that the “through a glass darkly” factor goes all the way down. Icons or symbols of what? Of the event. This is to say that confessional theology does not get a pass from the “facticity” of its constructions. It must confess that what it calls “supernatural revelation” is a “poetics of the event,” that is, a matter of a poetic insight, a head-turning vision of a form of life. It “exceeds reason” the way a poem does, not a supernatural intervention. The New Testament is the site of a gripping counter-cultural theo-poem called “the kingdom of God” which turns the world upside down, where the first are last, one that calls to us, lures us. But it must confess that all this unfolds without supernatural support and that there are as many such “revelations” as there are cultural traditions, each one a “special revelation,” special to itself, the way one’s parents are special, and so are everyone else’s parents. So I am distinguishing confessional beliefs as conditioned constructions from a more radical faith in the unconditional—there is always an ironic-iconic difference between the two—which, as Tillich shows, is not confined to “religion” at all. There are no temples in the heavenly Jerusalem. Radical theology is theology deprived of auto-legitimization, a deprivation which represents an emancipation from the illusion it indulges in and promotes of supernaturalism and the hubris of institutional or doctrinal authoritarianism—posing as an “authority” in matters so mysterious would be amusing were it not so dangerous. This is the reason no one trusts theology, its supernaturalism and authoritarianism, which for radical theology are entirely self-inflicted wounds. Any meticulous history—always the best way to undertake a deconstruction—of the tradition will expose its underlying ambiguity and undecidability, heterogeneity and polyphonic polymorphism. Thus deprived, these theopoems are emancipated, able to be read on their own terms, for what they have to say, not because of purported celestial provenance. So to answer Sands, that makes life inside a given confessional community a little uneasy because radical theologians attach a different status to the communal beliefs and reject the official self-description in which

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these communities, particularly conservative ones, indulge themselves. Radical theologians embrace these inherited figures as the special iconic version of the mystery that they have inherited, whose depths they seek to plumb without turning them into idols, without forgetting that they are but fingers pointing at the moon and have not dropped from the sky. As such, as so deprived/emancipated, radical theology is pretty much equivalent to radical thinking itself, a daring to think that (unlike many an Aufklärer) dares use the word God. Then how does it differ from philosophy? Well, if “philosophy” is also deprived of its illusions, of transcendental rationality, which authorizes its odium theologiae, if it understands that it is just giving “good reasons,” good interpretations (“radical hermeneutics”) for thinking this rather than that, then we see that, at the end of the day, over and beyond their methodological-disciplinary differences and rivalries—they read different books, attend different conferences—philosophy and theology are in the same boat. They both dance in a ring and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows. They are each a form of radical questioning, each trying to make themselves worthy of what is happening to them in the middle of a mystery, each one a form of remaining radically open to the mystery (which Heidegger just calls “thinking”). Once radicalized, that is, deprived of their illusions, they tend to run together, as different flavors of radical thinking, which is why I, personally, have never been able to choose between them. Radical thinking is in play wherever the mysterium tremendum et fascinans is in play and making itself felt—which today is inching away from philosophy (which no one understands) and theology (which no one trusts) and closer to physics and speculative cosmology. Carl Sagan’s “homily” on the “little blue dot” is a case in point. Deus sive natura—not aut but sive. Radical theology does not deny confessional theology; it hyper-affirms it, affirms it for all its worth, for more than it is worth, for the excess it contains but cannot contain (khora akhoraton). Sands suggests, then, in order to avoid thinking that radical theology is out to destroy theology, we can think of it as its sublation (Aufhebung), constantly raising theology up into a higher form. That is better than thinking of it as destructive, but, as he suspects, my Hegelianism is “headless,” afraid of heights, because the event, as the coming of what we cannot see coming, is risky business; it may be a disaster, and its result may end up (the “dangerous perhaps”) not in a higher form but a breakdown. I prefer to say it “spooks” confessional theology. So, in accord with the directionality of “radical” as digging down into the roots, I suggest we follow Heidegger when, analyzing Hegel, he proposes to describe “thinking” not as an Aufhebung, a raising-up, but as a Schritt-zurück, a step back—into the underlying event or potentiality that is possibilizing in the actual forms theology takes; it is more subterraneous than sublative, more excavational than making the steep ascent.2 The step back reopens the future

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which the tradition, by a natural inertia and tendency to sediment, inclines to close down. Radicalization is re-activation, de-sedimentation. We also want to avoid the implication that the event is some kind of inner essence that is gradually unfolding into some higher manifestation. Its possibilities are a function not of an eternal logos or law but of the historical instability of its constructions which are prone to slippage and “dissemination,” chance, errancy, destinerrance. Events are not essences achieving existence. They are not souls embodied in words. They are the sparks thrown off by historical constructions which may or may not spark off something, for better or for worse. Can confessional theology live with that? Only in its most progressive forms. As history testifies, the radical theologians are usually the ones filing for unemployment benefits. NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, “Do Radical Theologians Pray? A Spirituality of the Event,” Religions 12:9 (2021), 679. 2. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 42–76.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. “Do Radical Theologians Pray? A Spirituality of the Event.” Religions 12:9 (2021), 679. Heidegger, Martin. “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, 42–76. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Chapter 11

Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong Caputo’s Theopoetics of Event Erik Meganck

Gianni Vattimo can be said to have coined the phrase “weak thought” in philosophy, more specifically in Pensiero debole (1983). In his turn, Caputo can be said to have coined the phrase “weak faith” in theology (2006). They are both advocates of weakness as a key term of radical hermeneutics. They even published a book together, After the Death of God (2007), a year after the publication of Caputo’s The Weakness of God. Jeffrey Robbins aptly edited this book. He interviewed Caputo and Vattimo separately and then invited them to each write a contribution. Therefore, I find it remarkable and highly significant that they almost never refer to each other in their work. Caputo devotes a whole chapter to Richard Rorty1 and Vattimo in his Hermeneutics (2018) but did not mention him in his Radical Hermeneutics (1987) nor in his More Radical Hermeneutics (2000). He spends two pages on Vattimo in The Folly of God (2016), though, and two footnotes in The Weakness of God (2006). The other way around is even more surprising. Vattimo simply never mentions Caputo, not in connection with weakness, nor with radical hermeneutics, nor with theology. This contribution to a volume that deals with the European reception of the work of Caputo will then present an example of its rejection—a rejection that I will denounce as unfounded. It seems that Caputo recognizes his kinship with Vattimo, step by step, the more he moves toward theology and lowers the barriers between philosophy and theology through the radicalization of his hermeneutics. I contend that this was only possible by criticizing Vattimo’s version of radical hermeneutics and understanding weakness differently. This is how Caputo became known in European philosophy as the religious heir of Derrida. This, moreover, makes sense since Vattimo declared Derrida’s deconstruction over and done.2 237

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I further contend that Vattimo’s silence about Caputo is due to, first, Caputo’s critique that strikes Vattimo’s weak thought at its very core; second, to Caputo’s turning into a theologian; and finally to Caputo’s rehabilitation of Derrida which is more or less the opposite of what Vattimo tried to do. Actually, they are each other’s opposite in this way: whereas Vattimo reduces theology to philosophy, Caputo upgrades philosophy to theology.3 Vattimo’s weak thought has been duly criticized by Caputo. The latter also finds, articulates, and defends weakness, but one that profits from deconstruction. It hinges on the “event.” I elaborate on Caputo’s criticism of Vattimo and on Caputo’s weak theology of the event and argue how and why Caputo’s weaker weakness overrules Vattimo’s. This has to do, mainly, with Vattimo’s misunderstanding of Derrida and, as a consequence, the way Vattimo ends up with weakening as a strong metaphysical principle. Whereas Caputo makes weakness strong by keeping it weak, which sounds very biblical, Vattimo just makes weakness strong, which sounds very metaphysical. Let us now look at what they have in common, as a starting point. The most important feature of their work, at least according to myself, is their presentation of theology and Christian faith as something relevant, something that has to do with our very existence. They are not just weird obsolete discourses that deserve to stay marginalized and therefore only take place in faculties on the edge of the academic world and abbeys where people can go to buy beer and cheese and enjoy the silence away from the roar of the cities. Whereas Vattimo loses this “touch” and ends up in the middle of precisely what he was trying to leave behind, Caputo seems to succeed ever more in spiritualizing the late-modern world, picking up the signs and winks of an event that is also an “ad-vent.” Furthermore, they do not consider the “return of faith” as an attack on philosophy from outside. They do not share the fear of Dominique Janicaud that philosophy is being outsourced to theology as, again, its servant. What happens here to philosophy, to theology, and to faith is Christianity. First, I will present a critical reading of Vattimo’s weak ontology or “epistemotheology.” Then, I will demonstrate how Caputo’s weakening avoids Vattimo’s pitfalls. In Caputo’s word, Vattimo misses chôra. Caputo’s problem with Vattimo is “that there is no counterpart in his work to what Derrida calls khora.”4 Derrida borrows this non-idea from Plato. GIANNI VATTIMO In 1983, Gianni Vattimo famously coined the term “weakness” in philosophy.5 Basically, this says that the reign of facts is over and that we should

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from now on only interpret each other’s interpretations, out of mutual respect and friendliness. Referring to a strong principle that declares one interpretation true and all the others wrong is no longer acceptable. Reading René Girard, he “discovers” the Christian provenance of this weakness. This provenance shows him how weakening is, in fact, secularization. For a long time, theology suspected secularization to be an anti-Christian offensive from outside—this could be liberal politics, or decadent art, or rational philosophy. But lately, scholars have started to realize that secularization is the history of Christianity itself. Letting go of the strong, sacred power shows a remarkable congruity with weakening as letting go of strong metaphysical principles. Since Nietzsche, these powers and principles are unmasked as nonnegotiable but arbitrary and therefore highly violent and dangerous to thought and faith alike. At first almost unnoticed, weakening and secularization are becoming the one name of the history of Greek philosophy and the history of Jewish-Christian theology. This comes down to Vattimo providing the world with the one and only true model of History. If the provenance of weakening is Christian, then the driving force or basic motif of History must be caritas, Christian charity. Here, Vattimo comes full circle, as it were, because what he establishes as the very core of Christianity—if there is such a thing—always takes the form of a message, namely the Good Message or eu-angelion, which is Greek for Gospel. Weakening is the charitable message that there are only messages, interpretations. Thought has weakened and thereby become friendlier. It has left arbitrariness and nonnegotiability behind. And this means that weakening is not a loss (of force, certainty, etc.) but a gain, even a moral gain. It is a good thing because it lays off violence. Twenty years later, Caputo picks up this “weakness” and immediately points at some strong, what I call “epistemo-theo-logical,” hinges in Vattimo’s presentation and elaboration of weakness. This is, says Caputo, because Vattimo’s weakness has no “chôra,” thereby avoiding deconstruction. This way, however, Vattimo’s weakening inevitably becomes a metaphysical construct, as I will show. Vattimo exempts his weakening—that he has identified since then with, among others, secularization and Christian caritas—of weakening, since who would want to weaken charity? But by doing this he also exempts it from interpretation, and that is much more dangerous. This maneuver behind the weakening scene promotes weakness to a metaphysical principle, a hard and suprahistorical fact that does not bear interpretation, negotiation, or deconstruction. It is suprahistorical in that it had become the true nature of history itself, although that history is supposed to have led to the dissolution of history. This is where Vattimo’s secularization model becomes problematic. Weak thought started out as a nihilist follow-up of Heidegger’s attempt to think “beyond” metaphysics. Though Heidegger perceived nihilism as

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the crisis of metaphysics that would lead thought into a new understanding of Being, Vattimo turns to Nietzsche’s prophecy of Übermensch as the way out of metaphysics without a (new) understanding of Being. He inserts this Nietzschean scheme in a Heideggerian ontology of decay. The metaphysical notion of truth is then destined to lose its objectivity claim. Since Vattimo considers the installation of norms and principles an act of violence on the ground of their arbitrariness, such weakening can only be welcomed as “morally positive.” It is precisely as nihilism that weak thought pronounces itself ethically sound. Weak thought gently—initially, Vattimo calls it pietas—receives every thought, from past and present, as interpretation. These thoughts must not be upgraded to fact or discarded as mere fiction—a distinction that Nietzsche rejected. Weak thought is certainly not a purely theoretical matter. It does not offer a full objective explanation of the world. Weak thought is not about “installing” and “rejecting” (classical epistemology) but all about “­ proposing” and “receiving” (weak hermeneutics). Ongoing conversation—a term Vattimo borrows from Rorty—is not supposed to end up in an absolute truth that always already precedes every conversation. Thinking does not have to comply with anything but the demand of pietas. In this perspective, reality is understood as a sort of epistemic plasma, an endless flux of interpretations. This flux cannot warrant any privileged access to truth. Pietas imposes one imperative on this flux: prevent any interpretation from petrifying into fact. This is, according to Vattimo, the “good message” of nihilism, precisely that there are only messages, and shared interpretations. There can only be interpretations of other interpretations. Later, Vattimo recognizes the analogy between weakening and secularization. To him, pietas appears as the righteous heir of the Christian caritas. This discovery heralds no less than the return of God. Now that there are no more strong philosophical reasons to support atheism, God comes back. How did that happen? One might claim that atheism as a cultural pattern historically belongs to the period between the first and the last of all modern revolutions—1789 resp. 1968. Nowadays, serious intellectuals no longer feel the need to militantly deny faith on rational grounds. By weakening scientific truth claims, secularization itself has denounced the modern aim to sacrifice divine truth to scientific truth. On the other hand, secularization also discouraged the faithful to look for and use divine arguments to defend the historical and factual truth of the Bible. It is precisely twentieth-century hermeneutics that brought back poetic, mythical, and religious language on the philosophical forum by rejecting the positivist truth claim.6 Nietzsche’s autopsy of God is often read in the register of an atheist statement. But the death of God is not a proposition about the existence of God but the rejection of the validity of this kind of proposition. The God who returns

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is not a dead God that is brought back to life. It is still the God of Christianity. Is it the same God? No, since then it would be God that remained hidden during modernity and now enjoys a comeback. The God who returns in Vattimo’s philosophy is not an entity but rather an event, namely the return itself. God is his own return in that there’s nothing left “behind” in the return.7 But this event of the return is never more than just a phase or aspect of the major event of weakening. Late modernity, according to Vattimo, now understands the ultimate meaning of secularization. It is the systematic abolition of transcendence, of the sacred, of the origin . . . Kenosis on the one hand and weakening on the other appear as two sides of one history—that is the dissolution of History. As such, Vattimo considers God-as-return an essential feature of Christianity. The return belongs to the same destiny as weakening. Weakening is not a metaphysical-philosophical concept because it cannot be read as an ontological predicate, nor is return a metaphysical-theological one because it isn’t a category that objectively describes God. Returning belongs to the event of God in the same way as weakening belongs to the event of Being—or should I say: it is the event of Being. Returning and weakening do not relate as each other’s cause or effect, but “mirror” each other as philosophy and religion reflect on their intertwining provenance. Late modernity discerns a returning (i.e., God) in the same register as it observes a weakening (i.e., Being). Return, as the current meaning of religion, is a hermeneutic matter in that it is an event that hands God over to interpretation.8 “Hermeneutic” also implies that there is no question here of recapturing God in an onto-theological or dialectic way—where weakening “causes” the return of God, possibly due to the tragic experience of an irreducible insolvability of the human condition. In other words, hermeneutics encourages us to understand the return as “positive.”9 This way, Vattimo’s nihilist hermeneutics becomes an epistemo-theological determination of secularization: God is revelation in the late-modern sense of returning as flux of interpretations, the Good Message being that there are only messages, which is then the late-modern meaning of Christianity—again, according to Vattimo. Obviously, there is more going on than the mere translation of a philosophical theme, Being, into theological concepts, or more than the mere insertion of a theological term, kenosis, into an ontological discourse. The parallelism between weak philosophical and ditto theological discourse is not an “adaequatio,” objectively established at the end of a history that necessarily culminates in the ultimate and full truth of Nihilism. This approach would never fit into an essential feature of weak ontology, namely the eventuality, or also: the ad-ventuality of Being. Secularization befalls us in such a way that philosophy as well as theology cannot look away from it. They experience this event, not as theoretical fact, but as appeal.

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The theonomic provenance of weakening only comes to light in latemodernity, which is why earlier thinkers could not discern the delivering purport of secularization. Nietzsche nor Heidegger thought secularization radically through and thereby ignored the crucial connection between the death of God and the decay of Being on the one hand and incarnation and the death on the cross on the other hand. As a consequence, they could not understand the real meaning of the ontology of weakening. Kenosis as the very icon of the event of Being, “producing” weakening and the dissolution of the transcendent, was not yet disclosed then, Vattimo would say. We had to wait for his pietas to perceive or receive this disclosure. Vattimo is aware of how, on the one hand, the full purport of secularization appears in philosophical discourse at the “end” of metaphysics and, on the other hand, the appearance in the same discourse of terms like charity, solidarity, and the like. When charity, moreover, is understood without its ontological provenance of secularization, it tends to become little more than subjective, arbitrary sentimentality. In the same way, Nietzsche and Heidegger didn’t realize the ultimate Christian character of their critique of metaphysics, precisely because they ignored caritas and with it the Christian roots of thought itself. The full positivity of nihilist caritas can only be captured by Vattimo’s notion of secularization—says Vattimo. Now, how can caritas appear in philosophy as the ultimate meaning of the Christian message? A first, hermeneutical movement reveals the weakening of objective facts into interpretations, avoiding violent transcendent interventions; a second, ethical movement turns weakening into pietas, into an appeal to collaborate with dissolution of metaphysics as destiny; a third, nihilist movement refers pietas to its Christian provenance, which is caritas. It is not until this third movement takes place that Vattimo actually sees the full meaning of the Christian provenance of weakening as the basic ontological feature of late-modernity. Caritas doesn’t banish the notion of truth from philosophy. Truth in latemodernity has, however, left its transcendent and objectivist presumptions behind and becomes a truth that finds its validity in a historical, socio-ethical immanence. Caritas is not a theoretical concept that describes a situation adequately and therefore will change whenever the situation changes. Caritas does not change with praxis, it is praxis—at least, as long as it takes the form of pietas. Caritas became visible in ethical thought, in pietas, and is therefore not supposed to rely on any theoretical scheme. But this is where Vattimo makes a mistake. To ground weakness, Vattimo installs caritas as a principle that transcends interpretation, weakening, etc. Thematizing the “return of God” in our culture is very welcome in a time where religion and spirituality are, on the one hand, completely privatized and, on the other hand, almost completely commercialized. Vattimo

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challenges us to become aware of the public voice of religion, not just as something that escaped our attention but as something that could no longer be thought within the obsolete oppositional scheme of theism versus atheism. Religion returns as weak thought, which is not an option but belongs to the very historico-dynamical dynamics of Christianity itself, viz. secularization. This radical and provoking version of secularization even surpasses all other versions of positive evaluation and reception of secularization. Most models still retain some notion of a relation between God and the world in terms of alliance, compassion, deliverance, and so on with Christ as mediator, whereas Vattimo reduces this relation to a historically destined identification. In this way, secularization runs down in immanence whereas others still allow secularization to be affected with some kind of “desecularization”10—at least, insofar as they don’t identify secularization with history as such, as Vattimo does. He of course avoids such contamination and abolishes the ­relation by denouncing it as an asymmetry under the sign of sacred violence. This violence will keep on disappearing as long as Vattimo’s version of kenosis is the register of the event of Being. Vattimo in a way betrays Nietzsche’s “There are no longer facts, only interpretations; and this also is an interpretation” (see above) by omitting the last part and proclaiming something like “There are no longer facts, only interpretations; and this is the event of History!”11 The dissolution of History into histories, local intersecting narratives, has become the new History, the Grand Narrative of weakening and secularization. The absolute immanence that is implied in Vattimo’s radical hermeneutics needs a strong task force, called pietas, to detect and eliminate any local uprisings of transcendence— as does, for example, the “divine majesty” of Levinas’ face. An example of this could be to refer Christmas and Easter back to the birth of Jesus and the death of Christ; or even worse, to deny that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the ultimate meaning of Christianity, turning the latter into superfluous and even obnoxious folklore. According to those who string along with Vattimo, Christmas, Easter, and the UDHR retain their full meaning even after the Christian inspiration is gone, since they represent a friendliness that can be promoted without faith. It is as if they see Christianity—its faith, rituals, symbols, texts, and so on—as a tool that is no longer needed since it has achieved its purpose. Others would claim that without Christian inspiration and the events it represents and remembers, these celebrations and declarations remain flat consumption and dead letter. How does the right to education serve a starving child? The nihilist destination of Being stems from a radical collapse of transcendence, from the dissolution of the sacred. But is kenosis actually the abdication of transcendence? Is caritas really and essentially immanent? Where and how is this immanence safeguarded against transcendent intervention?

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Indeed, no-one will doubt that the ultimate meaning of Christianity, what distinguishes it from all other religions, lies in the abundance and unconditionality of caritas. Christ himself preaches a love far beyond any salvation economy. But is Vattimo’s caritas indeed Biblical? Is current late-modern nihilism the “correct” and “adequate” interpretation of Biblical caritas? Finally, can caritas be philosophically interpreted without losing some of its essential meaning? It is here that we can turn to Caputo. It is theologically acceptable to believe that no meaning can be added onto incarnation as God’s last word, onto the belief that Jesus is the Christ. By identifying revelation with history, with Being, and with secularization, Vattimo at least suggests that God did not become human but instead “immersed” into hermeneutic, socio-political, cultural, ethical, and philosophical spheres that suffer from weakening rather than being marked by sacramental signification—in the broadest possible sense of the word. Incarnation loses its connotation of “God’s last word” and tends to become a historic indicator—and this is precisely what Vattimo intends it to sound like. Incarnation directs the nihilist inclination of Being. In this way, Vattimo’s weakening became a linear and massive immersion of the divine into the profane—a very dubious opposition that is still heir to modernity.12

JOHN D. CAPUTO I will show how Caputo develops an interesting and fruitful philosophy/ theology from weakening. The reader will notice that, in the end, the voice of Vattimo will have completely disappeared. This is no coincidence. Whereas Vattimo declared differential thought over and tried to re-ontologize Nietzsche in Heideggerian vein, Caputo follows another path, namely the way Derrida takes up de-ontologized difference. Ontological difference seems to have “split up’ in two philosophical directions. Respected Heidegger scholars, however, have convincingly pointed out that Heidegger was moving away from ontological difference toward a more “general” difference.13 I will follow Caputo’s path, arriving in the end at his theopoetics. No Ontology Caputo’s weakness is not monolithic, like Vattimo’s. Its dynamics is not simply linear immersion but an excess hiding in a paradox. What happens in Caputo’s God is not simply metaphysical violence leaking away (Vattimo’s one-sided lecture of Phil2:6-8, leaving out 9-11) but an interesting play between the (worldly) powers at the surface and the (divine) powers

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“inside” as evoked in 1Cor1:18-28. This weakening is not Vattimo’s overarching ontology but the disruptive potency of the “event,” of what goes on within things and facts and names.14 Caputo has no need for an ontological argument in defense of weakening. “Events . . . travel close to the surface of what happens, lying low on the plane of immanence, far beneath the radar of big theories like the history of the Absolute Spirit or the Destiny of Being (Seinsgeschick).”15 By the way, Richard Rorty also doubted the ontological advantage of Vattimo’s secularization, let alone the necessity thereof. Of course, the “event” had to be liberated from the metaphysical yoke but Caputo does not recognize the advantage of a meta-event that serves as an argument in favor of the event. Vattimo’s secularization thesis contains a strong historical model that deduces the present from a past according to a certain logic that he calls weakening, an echo of Heidegger’s decay or Verwindung. Heidegger was more careful than Vattimo and did not allow his Verwindung to become the ultimate label of history, of Being. This way, destiny could open up to the eventuality of Being, to Er-eignis. Vattimo’s weakening does not open up; it ends as this flux of interpretations. Derrida’s model—if it is a model—shows an endless ending of metaphysics, since deconstruction is not a principle or a history. By silently turning weakening into a principle and a history, the achievement of nihilism becomes guaranteed and becomes a promised fact. Pietas is not open to what comes, to ad-vent, in that it imposes a strong demarcation principle on the path of thought, namely total and absolute weakness. It guards the present. This world consists of a diminution of facts that matches an increase of interpretations. This principle is Vattimo’s interpretation of Christian caritas and as such nonnegotiable. Caputo does not really bother about the past, unless as a sort of inspirational playground. He prefers premodernity over modernity because of the way theology and philosophy could then just keep leapfrogging without any mutual suspicion. His event is wended toward the future because it harbors the hope that the coming world will be “better.” This urges us to take the chance of going along with the event, to allow thought to become event-urous. In fact, “eventure” would also be a better term in Vattimo’s case, since it is all about what happens with, not to Being, cast by a destiny.16 Vattimo indeed seems to recognize only one event, namely Being-asweakening. What he offers us is an ontology of decay. To Caputo, event is what happens inside world, things, facts, and occurrences. What he offers us then is hauntology of hope. This is a striking trouvaille by Derrida. It suggests that through the cracks in the metaphysical system, invisible to metaphysics itself, appears all that remains suppressed by it. What is denied by ontology because it does not fit properly into a logical system is therefore not “erased”

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or “deleted.” It haunts thought, disrupts logic, trying to receive recognition. It shouts at us in a language that metaphysics does not hear and indeed finds itself unheard-of because it insists on remaining focused on facts and on what names refer to. When Vattimo mentions the “event,” he does barely elaborate on this notion, he just distinguishes it from fact. But weakening results in the fact of the flux. Again by the way, this flux is not Rorty’s ongoing conversation since that does not refer to an ontological meta-event. Radical hermeneutics is not interpretation being controlled by Vattimo’s pietas police, but thought becoming sensitive to the event. This event, the sense of things, is transcendence—what Vattimo identified with violence: remember how he considers all transcendence arbitrary and nonnegotiable. I wonder whether Caputo could agree with me here, as long as this transcendence does not recur to any external or strong principle. Transcendence means nothing else than that the event shakes things out of their shallow complacency, which is the surface of immanence.17 The thought that masters sensitivity to this transcendence is not propositional but religious, even virtuous; it is marked by hope, faith or trust, and love (charity, openness, hospitality, justice, democracy, etc.) of which three the latter is pivotal—the attentive reader will recognize 1Cor13:13.18 The promise that hides in the event is modestly eschatological: it promises that things will be “better,” without anyone knowing what exactly this “better” entails.19 This promise has no content and therefore remains a promise without promise (Derrida). Caputo does not distinguish radically between philosophy and theology, on the contrary. They both affirm the unconditional and the impossible, they both express hope, trust, and openness. Concepts can be defined, names can be referred to, and facts can be described. The event, on the other hand, is not about content. The promise is without content, as are “trace” (Levinas, Derrida), “Wink” (Heidegger), and “Funke” (Eckhart). It bears the weakest information but shakes up the whole world, that is the world as a whole. It does not weaken individual facts and strong interpretations, that is, explanations. It does not inform but transform—yet another mark of religious thought. Justice, democracy, and the like are appeals that are persistently “implemented” in (legal, political) forces (laws). God, however, is a name that remains without reference, which makes it “holy”: the Name. The Name names the “death of God.” Therefore, the Name can also be transcribed as “the death of “the death of God”.” This endless pulsation, other than an archived autopsy, has the “unformat” of deconstruction. It “shakes up” every implementation. It signals the resistance to any petrifaction, institutionalization, and subsequent suffocation of the events in this Name. This is why the world cannot let go of the Name, because then the event would shrink into facts and things, advent would boil down to extrapolation, and the world

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would go from a state of deconstruction into a final state of total epistemo(theo-)logical entropy—possibly this flux of interpretations as prophesized by Vattimo. Because I agree with Caputo, I have to disagree on the following. The Name (still capitalized, not because it represents a Supreme Being but because it is holy, without reference) does not belong to the world—which is precisely the monotheist creed.20 It is the Name at the opening (verbal tense) of the world that is meaning (again, verbal tense) in the sense that it makes sense. Perhaps it is the Name of the opening—since “opening” is not a thing or a fact, it is the event of world, of sense. The Name keeps the world open because it frustrates every attempt at closure—remember the Grand Unifying Theory. The Name that bears its event is God being out of his mind (“folly”), or better: out of our minds, beyond our theological or metaphysical—there is a huge overlap—constructs. There is almost no relation between name or fact on the one hand and event on the other, since relation suggests an epistemological operation to take you from one to the other and back. To see the event, Caputo says, we need to take an “ironic distance” from facts or names and the theologies and philosophies that thrive on them.21 I would propose that what keeps fact/name and event tied up at an ironic distance of each other is of the order of Plato’s chôra/chôrismos and Derrida’s différance. These are all but an ontological substrate, of course. These do not allow for mutual deduction or even translation. And what is more, according to standard metaphysics, these do not even exist. They are the hauntological a-topos of the event. Vattimo lacks chôra/chôrismos and différance, which is why he identifies the name God, the appeal of charity, and the event of weakening. This is also why he ends up with a strong metaphysics, as I demonstrated above. No Ethics If the thought that thinks event is not ontology, could it be ethics, then? No. Caputo, like Christ, does not like ethical systems. The title of his 1993 book says enough: Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Does the event have no moral qualification at all? Yes, it does, inasmuch as it harbors an appeal. This appeal puts me under an obligation, not because it has to, but because I cannot let go—Caputo becoming a bit Levinasian here. The Name calls the event, but at the same time the name can also stifle the event. It depends on our answer. It is comparable to Heidegger’s Wink, Levinas’ face and Derrida’s promise without promise. You can ignore these in the “name” of traditional epistemology, of logic, or of an obsolete truth model. It requires responsibility, not just submission to scientific reason. Because it is indecisive, the Name is morally ambiguous. Some will, in

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the name of God, prohibit abortion and euthanasia; others will promote those in the same name. Some kill in that name, others devote their life in that Name. In the first instance, the name loses its divinity—and its capital letter. It has become a function of politics, of economy, of self-preservation reflexes of a religious institute. Therefore, it has become submitted to the logic of the world. In the second instance, we have an event that falls beyond every explanation. What Father Damian did for the lepers cannot be explained by any psychological textbook, since they are all about self-preservation. It cannot even be called “good”; it is beyond, jenseits. The Name disrupts the ways of the world whereas the name obeys them.22 This might seem provocative, but I think that Vattimo cannot understand the passage where God tests Abraham, asking him whether he would be prepared to give him back his son, his most precious “gift.” Caputo sides with Kierkegaard here and recognizes the appeal to an unconditionality that cannot be realized in practice but needs to belong to the religious “spirit.”23 Vattimo would doubtlessly side with common ethics that only sees the repugnancy of murdering your own son. This reduces the whole complex biblical scene to a mere matter of do’s and don’t’s. Whereas Vattimo’s ethical pietas culminates in the strong metaphysical principle caritas, Caputo defends a “lowering” of these ethics into the layers of experience, living-together, answering to an appeal. This appeal does not come from an overarching destiny. Nor can it be deduced from a fixed scheme of duties and norms. There is no “third term” in obligation, outside you and me, Du und Ich. There is not an original and universally normative obligation that can be consulted, invoked, or imposed. If anything, obligation rings out from the sphere of the singular. Obligation, says Caputo, is what “comes over me,” is what happens to me.24 Therefore, it is of the order of the event. And indeed, its source is transcendent, says Caputo: “We cannot transcend it, because it is transcendence itself. We are the ones transcended, overcome, lifted up or put down, overtaken, thrown. Obligation is the sphere of what I did not constitute.”25 Theology Then, Perhaps? If the event cannot be captured by ontology or ethics, is it then theological? Caputo writes “I distinguish between the world and the event by which the world is disturbed, the unconditional claim that solicits the world from within that interrupts and summons it, which is what I think deconstruction is (if it is).”26 Is this not what Jean-Luc Nancy means when he writes “Christianity designates nothing other, essentially . . . , than the demand to open in this world an alterity or an unconditional alienation.”27 This is the transcendence that continental philosophy of religion wants to trace down. The word “trace” is not purely coincidental. The Greek-Jew thinkers Levinas and Derrida

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have elaborated on this notion. Still, this does not mean that on the one hand “trace” is typically Jewish and that on the other hand the event belongs exclusively to the Christian depositum fidei. Nevertheless, in this case, it belongs to Christian heritage or provenance—which is what it is only by the grace of major influences of the Jewish and the Arab cultures. I will take some examples from the Bible, to show how facts and their names on the one hand and events on the other (do not) relate. Let me start with the empty grave. Without the tremendous event of resurrection, this would just be an ordinary case of theft. Resurrection is not a function of any social, economic, political, aesthetic, even religious structure, institution, or pattern. It is an event that never took place, literally, but is still happening. The empty grave is not the meaning of resurrection, rather the other way around. The term “empty grave” gathers all meaning without exhausting or confining the sense of resurrection in any way. Resurrection, as an event, has nothing magical. It promises us that birth and death are not just biological processes and that our lives are no longer unavoidably and tragically determined by a blind fate. We can always start afresh, which is a common phrase to express the complex phenomenon of forgiveness. Or take an example from the Old Testament, the burning bush. This is not just a silly miracle—“Seek psychiatric help, for thou art talking to a plant”—but the evocation of a presence in absence, of a presence that therefore is not consumed under any physical condition. God presents himself in the withdrawal, which is precisely his Name. Another strong example is the tearing of the veil of the temple at the exact moment of Christ’s death. That is the name of a fact. But it has nothing to do with the poor quality of the tissue. It is a fact that refers to an event. The event “inside” the fact was not yet happening then, it was announced, in precisely the same way as the empty grave and the burning bush announced something that had to “sink in.” There is no longer an oppressive religious opposition between the sacred and the profane. Heaven is here on earth, wherever there is the love that Christ preaches. The event is nothing spectacular, even if it is awesome. It is as if the name or the concept is emptied, by tapping it with Nietzsche’s hammer, to stir up the event. The event has no content that is present at every moment, at the moment when the name drops. The event has no “given” content and supplies no data. It is not an act, nor the signification of an act. Take the Flood. We can read this in the strong sense but also a weak sense. The strong sense shows a God who acts with unlimited power and is totally present in this act. He and no-one else wipes out all mankind, setting one man apart. After this demonstration, he turns the table and starts a covenant, signing it with a rainbow. The weak version shows a God who suffers from people turning away from him, thereby undoing his creation work. By ignoring the source of sense, of meaningful life, people lose the element of sense. This is not a powerful God, but a weak God who cannot prevent mankind to perish in its

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own complacency—which is, I suspect, a fitting synonym for original sin. The strong God used to be the Master of the Universe, creating everything from nothing. This is the substantialist version of ex nihilo. The weak God just arranged a suitable world for his one and only creation, human being. There was no firm reason to do this, it was just ex nihilo. The rainbow does not say: “Now, see what you’ve done, worthless creatures!” That would be mere strategy, the economy of revenge. The weak version, again, would sound like “From now on, I will stay close to you, to help you through life. It will be tough as it is, so don’t think you can manage it on your own. I cannot offer anything substantial, like more power or anything like that, I can only show my presence in the image of a rainbow, something everyone wants to chase but no-one will ever reach. As long as you learn to love the chase, I’m at your side. Whenever you want to be the manager, the Vice Supreme Being in charge, you’re on your own.” This is not a threat; it is an appeal to be religious, that is, humble, hospitable, grateful, and so on instead of powerful, mighty, climbing every greasy pole that goes around. It almost begs us not to stifle the Name. The appeal entails a promise, the promise of sense, ex nihilo. Caputo calls himself a theologian of the event. Initially, Caputo was a more traditional theologian who wanted to enter a Catholic congregation. But this raised so many questions that he had to take up philosophy. To be more precise, he took up Heidegger, the philosopher who even questions questioning itself. Returning to theology, he could never be the same theologian he used to be. Philosophy taught him how to think critically about theology, about traditional, systematic, dogmatic theology. These did no longer adequately proclaim what faith is all about. What remained a suspicion at first became a clear “Funke,” an emphatic “Wink.” Caputo took great care not to allow this Funke or Wink to petrify into a theological system. That is why he came up with this notion of theopoetics. The germ of this notion was older—remember his “poetics of obligation.” In The Weakness of God, there is a chapter called “The Poetics of the Impossible.” Moving on, we read about “Theopoetics as the Insistence of a Radical Theology” in The Insistence of God—where he refers to the poetics of obligation.28 And again, in Cross and Cosmos: “From Theology to Theopoetics. An Excursion on Method in Theology.” Finally, in The Folly of God as well as in In Search of Radical Theology, theopoetics has become a very popular keyword that is no longer locked up in an apologetic chapter, as an isolated theme, but is at work throughout the whole book. Theopoetics dreams, imagines the divine.29 It does not establish or prove God. IF IT IS THEOPOETICS The subtitle of The Insistence of God is A Theology of Perhaps. The subtitle of Cross and Cosmos is A Theology of Difficult Glory. The subtitle of The

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Folly of God is A Theology of the Unconditional. What do the event, difficult glory, and the unconditional have in “common” that they explain and clarify each other? Surely these notions are impossible to connect? This is precisely where Caputo’s theopoetics comes in. Indeed, no logic, as in theo-logic, could ever make these notions “rhyme.” Since Caputo recently became, to everyone’s surprise, a Hegelian theologian, let us start from there. In The Insistence of God, he argues that Hegel serves us better as an inspiration than Kant.30 Kant, according to Caputo, tended to set God apart, as an untouchable ground. Hegel situated the religious, that is, Christianity, between art and philosophy, between expression and concept. There he finds the imagery that theopoetics is made of. Actually, what Caputo does here, is to think Hegel while taking Heidegger’s “step back,” refusing the metaphysical accomplishment, turning away from a conceptual completion of faith. What I see then, is a Kantianized Hegel—more or less the same way as Vattimo comes up with a Nietzscheanized Heidegger. The completion, Aufhebung, is so crucial to Hegel’s system that if he would have imagined the possibility of anyone withholding this, he would never have granted Christian religion the “penultimate position.” On the other hand, he would never have written a Kritik der dichterischen Vernunft either. Hegel went for the full picture, without any compromise. Christianity also realized this fullness but not on a conceptual level; it could not get beyond the metaphors. It was up to Hegel’s philosophy to “purify” Christian truth and lift it from the level of the Vorstellung to that of the Begriff. Even in these seemingly innocent terms we can see this famous dialectics at work. In Vor-stellung, what is “vor” still remains outside, external, strange. Only when I can grasp it, be-greifen or get a grip, it becomes mine, internalized, at home with the Geist. If one starts to question this system, one enters a critical discourse in the way Kant did. Is totality really the true reach of reason? Are there no limits to the amount of necessity required in understanding reality as a phenomenology or revelation? The delineation that sets God apart from the world does not have to be a metaphysical operation, viz. the installation of a Supreme Being that is at the same time at the top of the world and beyond.31 It could be a monotheist delineation that declares that only God is God, that only God “gods.” It could, following Jean-Luc Nancy, be a mono-atheist delineation, adding that in order for God to be “god,” he does not need to be present. This is, I think, nothing more or less than the Biblical “in but not of the world.” CLOSING REMARKS Jeffrey Robbins writes: “To Vattimo, Caputo will submit his death of God philosophy to a deconstructive critique. To Caputo, Vattimo will offer his

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interpretation of the death of God and the modern process of secularization as a faithful recovery of kenotic Christianity and a reorientation toward the very essence of the Christian faith—namely, that of agape.”32 I still see the benefit of distinguishing between philosophy and theology, as two registers on the continuum that is faithful or religious thought—this thought being overtly marked by hope, trust, and openness instead of logic, method, and certainty. Philosophy has indeed taken up the role of servant of theology, with “cleaning,” as servants sometimes do, being the first item of its job description. It has to be radically a-theist. It tears down the theisms, the traditional metaphysical constructs that petrified thought over and over again without ever reaching the ultimate system, though repeatedly promised—a Grand Unifying Theory. It tears them down until all that is left is nothing but world and a Name that does not cling to the world but also never leaves it, retreating into a total otherness. Once the theisms have been “deconstrued” (philosophy . . .), we can follow that Name (. . . becoming . . .), hear it, and answer it (. . . theopoetics). This is an endless adventure since the displacement of concepts and the production of metaphors are not limited by any logic. Theopoetics does not have to be propositional or predicative. It does not want to describe or explain anything. It wants to deliver itself onto the event. An event is not there to analyze or comprehend. One can only testify of an event. How can we speak in the name of another? On the other hand, do we not always speak in the name of an alterity? Sometimes only music can testify of what cannot be, literally, “put in words.” When someone would say: “You are the greatest that can be thought, I even think you are greater than anything that can be thought,” then it would be a mistake to read this as two separate propositions that need to comply to the nonnegotiable principle of non-contradiction. It is a declaration of love, an excessive love, and a love of the excess. Those words express the very event of excess itself. Therefore, it is theopoetical. Finally, the only thing that worries me a bit in Caputo’s theology is the way he sometimes denigrates Christian tradition and its theology. I honestly found the way he talks about this in his Hoping against hope almost uncomfortable, sometimes even unfair. I am not saying Caputo belongs to this secularization school where Christianity is considered superfluous since we now have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is plain nonsense since without a Christian inspiration and motivation, this declaration remains dead letter. Still, it seems too easy to declare something superfluous if it turns out to be indestructible anyway. To be more precise, the message seems indestructible, not the format.33 Take, for instance, the phenomenon of the dogma. In a strong theology, this means an absolute and nonnegotiable truth. But in a weak theology, these dogmas could still subsist under a hermeneutic form.

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They are no longer absolute and nonnegotiable, but they mark the places where theology has become undecidable. Is Mary capable of going up to the Father on her own account or not? In other words, do we have here a case of ascension or assumption? And was she born with or without original sin? When the community of the faithful cannot decide, the Vatican puts down its foot and argues: “This has become like the problem of the amount of angels that can dance on the top of a pin; and we do not want to wake up another Descartes. Let’s all agree on Assumption and Immaculate Conception, and then we can get on with more relevant problems on the current theological agenda.” One of these problems is the befriending with philosophy on the other side of the death of God. NOTES 1. Santiago Zabala edited a dialogue between Vattimo and Rorty, The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 2. Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference. Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 137ff. 3. This may sound tendentious, but it is not. One could easily claim that Vattimo as well as Caputo identify philosophy and theology to a large extent, but Vattimo does this by denying any theological autonomy whereas Caputo “enriches” philosophy with its theological provenance. 4. John D. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event,” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 83. 5. Gianni Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10:1 (1984), 15–164. What follows is an abbreviated version of Erik Meganck, “God Returns as Nihilist Caritas: Secularization according to Gianni Vattimo,” Sophia. International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 54:3 (2015), 363–379. I have chosen not to insert bibliographical references in the text, since that would certainly have rendered it unreadable. All the positions I attribute to Vattimo can be found passim in the texts mentioned above. 6. Caputo will defend something like theopoetics. See later. 7. One could see then how this return is a late-modern philosophical figure of Revelation. 8. “Handing over” is the meaning of tradition. Becoming a bit Heideggerian, I could say that according to Vattimo, return is the name of God arriving in thought. 9. The term “positive” has nothing to do with positivism here. It refers, first, to the recognition of the return, not as a fact but as an event that offers itself to cultural experience; second, to the moral advantage of the return as a nihilist religious experience; third, to the historical irreversibility of the return, defying a nostalgic “rewinding” of secularization. 10. Erik Meganck, “Desecularization: Thinking secularization beyond metaphysics,” Angelaki 26: 3–4 (2021), 178–194.

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11. A very ugly implication hereof is that everything that is “earlier” is also “worse.” This is an echo of the modern distinction between on the one hand “primitive’ and therefore “superstitious’ which is the same as “religious,” and on the other hand “scientifically rational,” “faith-free,” and therefore “objective.” But even worse than this, it turns the church fathers and certainly the Jews into the bad guys. The Jews belong to the era of the Father, this arbitrary revengeful figure that is no better than the scum that ruled the Greeks or the German tribes. Then came the age of the Son, with Christ as the only true way to God and charity. Now, at last, Vattimo is able to announce the age of the Spirit, of interpretation. 12. The non-relation between the divine and the profane is of the order of difference, not opposition. The opposite of profane would be sacred. Desacralization “undoes” the opposition. Vattimo does not accept this “difference.” 13. William Richardson, Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1962). 14. Caputo refers to Deleuze’s twenty-first series in his Logique du sens (Paris: Editions du minuit, 1969). 15. John D. Caputo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 49. 16. Erik Meganck, From veritas to caritas. A critical reading of Gianni Vattimo’s nihilism. Unpublished dissertation, UAntwerp, 2011, 89; passim. 17. Immanence is not the mere sum total of things, but the unsustainable complacency of an enclosed world. Transcendence is not the other world, but an open world. 18. The traditional Greek virtues, older than those of Paul, try to silence the event in favor of institutional harmony, stable structure, systems of presence. 19. This “better” mustn’t sound like “It had to be this way.” There is no necessity, no worldly law that ordains this “better.” It is not ethically qualified, is not measurable, and cannot be established even by looking back. 20. This creed is essentially atheist. It doesn’t say anything about God’s existence or nature or amount, it just states that the divine does not belong to the world—without there being another one, of course. “Gott gottet” about sums it up. 21. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God. A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 9. 22. Paraphrasing Eckhart, “I pray the Name to shake off the names.” 23. John D. Caputo. In Search of Radical Theology. Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 15, 84. 24. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 24. 25. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 27. 26. John D. Caputo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 82.

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27. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 10. 28. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 66. 29. It is not theopoetry, and has as such nothing to do with literary style, rhyme, or verse. 30. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 67ff. 31. This oscillation reminds of Anselm’s prayer or love declaration in the famous Proslogion, where he calls God that higher than which nothing can be thought—the Supreme Being—and at the same time that which is higher than (anything that can be) thought—the excess that remained unheard-off in traditional metaphysics. 32. Jeffrey Robbins in his introduction to John D. Caputo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 13–14. 33. Erik Meganck, “Re-telling Faith: A Contemporary Philosophical Redraft of Christianity as Hermeneutics,” New Blackfriars 99:1079 (2018), 30–46.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God. A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology. Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Caputo, John D. and Gianni Vattimo. After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Editions du minuit, 1969. Meganck, Erik. From Veritas to Caritas. A Critical Reading of Gianni Vattimo’s Nihilism. Unpublished dissertation, UAntwerp, 2011. Meganck, Erik. “God Returns as Nihilist Caritas. Secularization according to Gianni Vattimo.” Sophia. International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 54:3 (2015), 363–379. Meganck, Erik. “Philosophia Amica Theologiae. Weak Faith and Theological Difference.” Modern Theology 31:3 (2015), 377–402. Meganck, Erik. “Re-telling Faith: A Contemporary Philosophical Redraft of Christianity as Hermeneutics.” New Blackfriars 99:1079 (2018), 30–46. Meganck, Erik. “Desecularization. Thinking Secularization beyond Metaphysics.” Angelaki 26: 3–4 (2021), 178–194. Richardson, William. Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1962.

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Van der Heiden G.-J. The Voice of Misery. A Continental Philosophy of Testimony. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Vattimo, Gianni. “Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10:1 (1984), 15–164. Vattimo, Gianni. The Adventure of Difference. Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation. The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Vattimo, Gianni. A Farewell to Truth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Vattimo, Gianni, and René Girard. Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith. Edited by P. Antonello. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Vattimo, Gianni, and Richard Rorty. The Future of Religion. Ed. S. Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Response to Meganck John D. Caputo

Erik Meganck makes an important point that deserves to be underlined. Vattimo and I share the language of “weak” thinking, both identify this weakness with hermeneutics, and both draw upon Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Gadamer. We are also both Italian, although in my case, a weak Italian(-American) Roman Catholics who submit Vatican-style Catholicism to a robust postmodern scolding. Yet, we have had very little to do with each other. I have only cited him incidentally and he has never cited me at all. Even After the Death of God, the book Jeff Robbins edited which brought the two of us together was something of an afterthought. It was originally meant to be a dialogue with Altizer which we could not work out. So I welcome the opportunity Meganck’s paper provides to make the record be clear. My original use of the figure of weakness had nothing to do Vattimo or the “death of God” or with its reading of the kenosis or even with Christianity. Its original sources were Jewish. I was struck by Walter Benjamin’s description of a “weak messianic force,” which describes the claim the dead have upon the living, where weak meant that we cannot change the injustices of the past and messianic meant that we are the ones the dead are waiting for to make the wrong that was done to them, to do here and now what might have been done then but was not. As Levinas says, we cannot change the past but we can change the meaning of the past. Furthermore my attention was originally drawn to Benjamin by Derrida’s multiple references to him, beginning with “Force of Law,” but in particular in a footnote in Specters of Marx.1 Only then did I link this so far completely Jewish-prophetic idea (Benjamin, Derrida, Marx, and Levinas) to the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz’s description of the “dangerous memory of suffering,” that is, to a theology of the cross which turns on a very Jewish Jesus, whom I call Yeshua, while trying to keep my distance from the Christianization of 257

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Yeshua against which the historical-critical literature alerts us. Today we can see the danger that past suffering poses to a complacent present, which does not want to remember the uncomfortable truth of the past, in the Right wing in the United States, which wants to block public schools from teaching the Holocaust, the history of American slavery, and the genocide of native Americans. I then organized all of this around a “theology of the event,” of the call or claim that is laid upon us in the name of God, around Paul’s reference to the “weakness of God” (1 Cor 1:25), which is greater than the power of the world. Paul, I might add, is still another Jewish source of the messianic (Messiah Yeshua). It was from that constellation that The Weakness of God was written. Vattimo was an afterthought. He had nothing to do with any of this. It was only afterward that it hit me that all of this was treading on terminological ground previously visited by Vattimo. So I added him to the list of philosophers of weakness,2 not because he was a source I was drawing upon—his name never appears again in the book—but because his idea of “weakening” metaphysics into interpretation was, as far as it goes, a contribution to the cause. I used the occasion of After the Death of God to point out the serious reservations I have about Vattimo’s version of weak thought, which first and foremost turn on Vattimo’s Christo-centrism and implicit supersessionism, which make light of the Jewish sources to which I have recourse. As Meganck points out, and as I said in response to Agata Bielik-Robson, I take Vattimo’s weakness to be too strong, too much of a meta-narrative, tethered to a death of God theology which is structurally implicated in Christo-centrism, in a depreciation of Judaism which must, in this Trinitarian schema, play the role of the “bad guy,” of the alien transcendent Father. Vattimo’s weak thinking reflects a hostility to what is precisely Jewish and not Christian in Levinas and Derrida, which is the irreducible importance of defending a viable notion of the messianic character of the tout autre. So Vattimo and I have overlapping interests but neither of us has made any substantive use of the other’s work and we have substantive differences. This lack of a tout autre goes hand in hand with the lack of any counterpart to the khora, as Meganck points out. The result is a failure to appreciate the auto-deconstructibility of our favorite ideas—like the “west,” “Christianity,” and “love”—which are at best promise/threats, imperfect promissory notes of what is to come, of a Messiah who is never going to show up, or who may turn out to be a monster. I find the various ways Meganck has worked out my relationship with Vattimo very helpful. He has excellent command of the two bodies of work and he has things to say that I never thought of, so I am very grateful for the innovative way he has put all this. I also think he is on to something when he says that Vattimo and I see no ultimate difference between philosophy and theology, Vattimo because he reduces theology to philosophy and I elevate

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philosophy into theology. He singles out the last page of Philosophy and Theology which I have always numbered among my own personal favorite passages—if I am allowed to have one. I have, for better or for worse, passed my life moving in the distance between philosophy and theology and have never quite decided in which of these two garments I prefer to lace the mystery which we are to ourselves, which all things are. I spent nearly my entire career teaching philosophy at a Catholic university, where philosophy and theology are granted special privilege in the curriculum, a point I vigorously defended. I do not think that philosophy and theology can be effectively practiced in isolation from each other—but saying that requires a qualification: each one needs to be weakened. For theology to make sense, to get people to start trusting it, it must get rid of “the attitude,” as we say in English, or, as we say in phenomenology, “suspend” the supernatural attitude, the self-inflicted illusion that theologians have privileged information based on communications from supernatural powers that transcend the natural order. Theology thus deprived of the supernatural attitude is theopoetics, a vision of what the world would look like if the “kingdom of God” held sway. Philosophy, in turn, must get rid of (suspend) the “transcendental attitude,” give up the illusion that it has tapped into some overarching ahistorical Rationality, in the upper case. Consider the amusing spectacle of Kant contriving exactly twelve historically contingent, highly datable and locatable, white-male, western-German and Newtonian categories of the “pure understanding” and then endowing them with “transcendental” status, for everyone and everywhere for all time! Philosophy deprived of transcendental rationality deals in “good reasons.” When we get philosophers and theologians to agree in advance that they pull their pants on leg at a time, to sign on to the “hermeneutics of facticity,” so that theologians are interpreting culturally inherited poems and parables, while philosophers are looking for contextually good reasons to think this rather than that, then they can commonly admit that we all “dance round the ring and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows.” If we dig deeply enough into either philosophy or theology, we will hit the other, joined at that point where we recognize we are both siblings of the same dark night, confessing the mystery of it all. Therein lies the passion.

NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55, 180–81n2.

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2. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Chapter 12

Hospitality in Action A Question for Practical Theology? Pascale Renaud-Grosbras

Between the two World Wars, natural theology was a hotly debated issue in European Protestant theology. Karl Barth thought that human beings were radically unable of receiving God, who had to create within them the means of knowing God because there is a radical opposition between humans and God, and time and eternity—building on Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity.” In other words, the natural world can teach us nothing about God, only God’s self-revelation in Christ can, only grace can. When Emil Brunner wrote that some form of natural theology was acceptable, Barth countered with a resounding Nein! in a conversation that eventually ended the two men’s friendship. The question, of course, became: how can we know God if God is the ultimate Wholly Other? What exactly is God doing when God creates within us the means of knowing God? Once it has been accepted that human beings cannot make their own salvation but that God only acts in this regard, how exactly are we to know of salvation? How exactly are we to understand ourselves now, in relation to this Wholly Other? The event, indeed, is lurking, and yet it seems that our means of knowing of it are quite limited, desperately so even. After all, Jesus came not as a knowable, recognizable God, but as the tiniest of babies in the remotest of saintless places, so we should not be so surprised, and yet we are ever so surprised. So be it: let us be surprised, let us assume that God means to surprise us, or at least that the event resists our every expectation of being able to domesticate the divine. Let us, then, say this: the first moment of hospitality between God and the humans is never ours: the first moment (moment is to be understood, here, not as a chronological item, but as a logical step) is when the event, when God becomes close to us, but not in any way that might allow us to keep God 261

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close, to keep God here. The first horizon of hospitality is impossible and unimaginable in that it always subverts our expectations. And yet—dialectical theology still asks “how”: how is it that, while religion is a human movement to try and get close to God, an impossible dream, still there is faith? God is an impossible guest (there is no address where we could send an invitation) even if God is expected (considering the ontological need of humans to expect God) and it is impossible for us to receive God knowing whom to expect—and yet, there is faith. This is where Bultmann’s option comes into play.1 Faith, he says, is necessarily paradoxical. It comes as an answer to a very human need, the need to believe, but it comes as a reproach to that very need, as a refusal or an admonishment of that religious impulse. For humans, in this way, receiving God is to be converted to another God in every single instant of your believing life. God, is that exhausting. And yet—and yet can it be any other way? The event is a meeting, but a meeting we were not prepared for, we could not be prepared for. There is simultaneously an attachment to human questions, an anchor in a way, and an opposition to those very questions. There we were, expecting a Messiah, and there we are, welcoming Jesus. Faith is the movement in-between, faith is the welcoming of the impossible Other. Faith might be called, if we must, un non-savoir actif, an active not-knowing that attaches to a real question. This is why faith is existential, in the original sense of calling us out of ourselves, unmoored to our expectations, and yet owing those expectations our only chance of getting to know the event. Religion is an attempt to make God a permanent guest. Faith is accepting to be converted again and again to the unknowable stranger who invites himself in. The event can only happen if it is moored to our actual questions, but in the same movement, it will undermine those questions. There will always be a gap between the Messiah and Jesus, when faith gives us to understand that one can only be the other. The Protestant insistence on the Bible derives from this understanding of faith. While reading, as a reader, one can only place themselves in the middle of things, in a privileged place, and yet there is Another in there, the center of the text is already occupied. We are meeting God in the strangest of places, in a dialog where one of the interlocutors is absent, and yet present, impossible to annex and yet talking. Faith is impossible, the event is impossible, reading is impossible—and yet. Of course, there is the religious impulse to know, to possess a meaning, to enclose God in our practices, our rites, our ideas. And yet, it so happens that reading opens new vistas, just because some other God is met there, resists there, different from the God of our imagination. Reading is a risk, because it introduces us to a shifting reality, a new revelation of who the interlocutor is. Derrida, when he talked about hospitality, underlined the fact that we are stuck in an impossible

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choice: if we let the stranger in, no question asked, this is unconditional hospitality, sure, but unconditional means there can be no condition, no question, and yet our first obligation is to ask for a name, in order to be really hospitable to this very person and not just to a nameless idea, and then, welcoming a singular stranger is not welcoming the other anymore. We are in a bind, but Bultmann would have said, probably, that we cannot but be in a bind. Hospitality is impossible and yet . . . faith is impossible, and yet. In a way, an easy way out is to remember that for theology, humans are but creatures welcomed into a creation, never responsible for the very fact that there is a creation to begin with. There is such a thing as unconditional hospitality, sure, but it originates in a radically other origin we have no power over. In the prolog to the Gospel according to John, the paradox is that Jesus came into this world and the world did not receive him, and yet in the same breath, it is said that those who received this Word incarnate have received the power to become children of God. So which is it? Did we, or did we not receive him? Well, the question is in the question: the impossibility of receiving God is the very question where a possibility is opened. But the way in which it is realized will remain open. We will not know, but it will be an active, assumed unknowing. There are three logical moments in the impossible hospitality between God and the humans. The first logical moment (again, not chronological, but the first logical moment in that it necessarily precedes the others) is God’s hospitality for us. The first pages of the Bible invite us into a world of words to echo a world of impossible hospitality, impossible to imagine, impossible to master, and yet. Humans are invited to paradoxically participate in the second logical moment of hospitality, a response to an impossible question, a response to the questioning of the question: discipleship perhaps (peut-être). Think Zacchaeus trying to see and ending up seen, climbing into a tree but meeting Jesus somehow from the ground, finding himself hospitable for an impossible guest, all in the same movement. If the first moment could be called grace, this second moment is the moment of faith, but one is only possible because the other was made possible by God. A third movement might be the mutual hospitality of brotherhood (and sisterhood), or community, a matter for a parable of organs useful to each other without ever choosing to grow there, in this place and this function, or of identities that no longer signify, differences that no longer make a difference (for there is no longer). Community in the Christian sense is not a matter of choice, it is, in a way, as much a surprise as faith might be, as much of a gift, an event and an impossibility. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another dialectical theologian, taught that the assembly is “the miracle and the act of God. I belong to Christ, this is why I belong to the assembly. I stand where the Word

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is preached. My place is in the assembly. I can no more wonder why than I can wonder why I need my mother. Our relationship exists, that’s all!”2 What might still be a matter of choice is diakonia, the service rendered to others, to strangers, but only if it is lived as a true gift, with no expectation as to a result, no attempt to master whatever good might come out of it—that is, probably never. And yet. In a way, we will never know we have done good, we will not know we have received Christ (Matthew 25,38), and yet we will have, which the Epistle to the Hebrews translates as: “Do not neglect to show hospitality (philoxenia) to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels.” Grace, faith, community, service: all impossible, all of the order of the event, all a gift. Of course, all those things only exist insofar as we can talk about them, think about them, say they are actually a thing and eventually, decide they are actually a thing and act upon the decision. As John Caputo put it: “That is why we require hermeneutics. It is our responsibility to breathe with the spirit of Jesus, to implement, to invent, to convert his poetics into a praxis, which means to make the political order resonate with the radicality of someone whose vision was not precisely political.”3 It so happens that religion acts as a shield against the weight of this responsibility. Dialectical theology asserts that sin is the absolute opposition to God, therefore there is no way to know God unless God is making Godself known. It also asserts that sin is the attitude that consists in putting something in place of God (another god, oneself, any kind of idol). Therefore, and here lies the dialectic, faith, and grace, and all those things that have to be known and thought in order to be done, only God can have humans recognize that something else is occupying God’s place in their lives and civilizations and hearts and what not. The knot is a complex one to untangle. And yet. The Gospel and human life actually get to discuss quite amiably once humans let go (are ripped from) the everlasting temptation of hanging on to idols. Barth would say how it is done is a kind of mystery because, by definition, only God can do it and only God can know how to do it. Bultmann has another, quite elegant, solution: we do actually know how it is done, it’s just that we can’t do it ourselves. God’s grace attaches itself to us: only it does not attach to our best qualities, our religious penchant, or our great theological ideas that tell us we are ready for God, and eager for God— indeed we are not. Grace, rather, attaches itself to the worst in us, individually and collectively, it attaches directly to what rejects it most radically, that is, of course, sin. Grace attaches itself to what most opposes it. We expected a Messiah and here comes the humble Jesus; we expected God to come via our religious niceties and we are visited at the very heart of our worst selves. At some point, a conversion actually happens. Paul, as usual, knew how to talk of this: where sin abounds, grace abounds more. Of course it does: it has to get its roots in us precisely where it is least expected, least wanted, most

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hated. Despite our best efforts to attract it to where we are ever so nice and polished and good—and religious—it attaches to the worst. Those who understand it are ta me onta, the nothings among us, that is, those who harbor the fewest illusions about themselves. Practical theology is what, in the vast field of theology, makes us especially aware of the gap between our words and our deeds, our ideals, and our failings to act according to those ideals. There is a gap—un écart—between the Gospel and our practices, between Christ and the Church, between the coming One and the staying ones. Nowhere is practical theology so useful than in the attempt to understand how hospitality may be lived in the Church, not as an obscure and mysterious thing, but as living, rough reality. We are not talking here of adding coffee to the after-church community ritual, but of understanding the profound, spiritual need for a deeper hospitality, for the event of hospitality. I am thinking now of Mrs. M, who arrived in France in the 1970s from Africa and joined the equivalent of her church of origin in a French city while she was finishing her degree. She describes being in “her corner” for many years, hardly seen by anyone, with some among the parishioners regularly asking her if it was her first time there. “I felt as a stranger, and yet I knew that in God’s house, I should not have felt as a stranger.” Two things kept her going there: her reading of the Bible, and her son, who was born out of wedlock. On the one hand, being a single mother was clearly, for her, cause for remaining as discreet as possible, as it was considered a sin in her church of origin and probably, she thought, frowned upon in this new church. On the other hand, this is precisely where the miracle happened: “I felt guilty, alone with a child, and still going to church. . . . Now I tell people: if you feel a stranger, then you have not understood that you were in Christ’s home.” One might say that there is a radical conversion in between those two positions: first feeling guilty for being here (because religion posits that church is for good people) and then feeling legitimate because faith posits that church is Christ’s home. From feeling rejected on account of her “sin” to feeling justified by someone else whose decision is decisive, from dogma to faith in a relational God/Christ, Mrs. M went from hoping for some human hospitality to understanding that true hospitality is only for God to create and for humans to live by, by faith only. This passage from belief to faith is indeed essential. To quote John Caputo, “belief is to be distinguished from faith as the conditional from the unconditional. We can unplug from a religious belief altogether or try to convert to another. We can weaken our cultural or religious identity, learn another language, relocate. But faith is a more underlying matter from which we cannot or at least ought not unplug. Faith has to do with a deeper fidelity, a deeper responsibility to what is calling upon or visiting itself upon us unconditionally,

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wherever we live and whatever we believe. When beliefs deepen, entrenchment sets in, fundamentalism waxes, searching wanes. When faith deepens, beliefs are destabilized, searching waxes, fundamentalism wanes.”4 Paradoxically, the unhospitable environment of that French church was the condition for the revelation of God’s radical hospitality. What are we supposed to make of this? Does this mean that practical theology should stop striving for practices that better reflect God’s grace, or the Gospel, or whatever we want to call it? Probably not, but it means at least that it should strive for better practices only as provisional, imperfect, never-quite-faithful ways of pointing to another reality. One might call this the kingdom, for example, this weird place where others precede us who seem a lot less worthy of God’s attention in the first place and yet, there you go. For John Caputo, the kingdom is very much of this world, but it is precisely where our practices reflect an ethical choice we would not make by ourselves: “But what, then, is the kingdom of God? Where is it found? It is found every time an offense is forgiven, every time a stranger is made welcome, every time an enemy is embraced, every time the least among us is lifted up, every time the law is made to serve justice, every time a prophetic voice is raised against injustice, every time the law and the prophets are summed up by love.”5 The risk of hospitality opens up new vistas for the church, in that it lets something of the kingdom shine through. Mrs. M, by talking about the conversion she experienced, from beliefs to faith, was able to change the local church. The event of hospitality, what was going on in the name of this forgiving, Tout Autre Dieu, changed not only Mrs. M but also the way the local congregation understood itself. It could, indeed, be the place for such a radical grace. Best, then, to be aware of it and, maybe, actually become a welcoming, graceful community, or to say it otherwise: to let some unconditionality shine through its (still) conditional welcoming of the other. This is, in part, what Eckhart is saying when he says that the kingdom is not up there, but down here, among us, for us to work at. For Eckhart, as John Caputo puts it, “the world is the place where God, or as I prefer to put it now, what is going on in the name of God is brought to bear, in fact and deed. Eckhart went so far as to say that God needs human beings in order to be God. This is the mystical predecessor of what I am calling the ‘insistence of God,’ where God needs us to be provided with existence. I am slowly building up the nerve to blurt out what I really think: that the world is the place where God gets to be God. Maybe if I put off saying that until the very end, I can get it out and then beat a hasty retreat before the Inquisition even learns my name.”6 Maybe, just maybe (I too am trying to resist the temptation to flee here), there is a margin for discussion here. Maybe this is not quite radical enough.

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Maybe the world is not just the place for God to be God, but the place for God to be a relational God. Luther was inspired by Eckhart: the world, he said, is where we live for real, and to try and earn your salvation by watching the skies all day is nothing more than daydreaming (to paraphrase). The larger context of course is Luther’s attack on the Catholic Church of his time, in which believers were led to believe that salvation could be bought, or at least purgatory avoided. Putting salvation strictly back where it came from—God’s own will and might—was thus not just a theological debate gone sour, it was a fight for the idea of equality among all humans, as far as the human vocation to be saved was concerned. Instead of trying to work for your salvation, try and live as saved humans, was the core message, to put it crudely, thus to live in the world. Humans’ natural propensity is to watch the skies and try to look for sainthood up there, striving to elevate themselves and climb up there with God. In his commentary of the Magnificat, Luther wrote that, while humans spend their time trying to climb upward and contemplating the heavens, God, where God is, has nothing to look at—there is only God up there, nothing to see. So, God looks downward and the lower we are, the better God sees us. That is grace: God’s watchful presence, looking down toward us, striving for a relationship with us creatures. Of course, the young Mary might respond in kind, glance for glance, and keep watching the heavens. The miracle, according to Luther, is that Mary, swept up in this downward glance, also turns her eyes downward, toward the depths of humanity, toward all those who are crushed down, knowing that God’s vocation and only occupation is to raise up what is down and to lower what is up, “to break what is and to repair what is broken.” This is how Jesus was born and the effects of God’s irruption into our world has changed it, says Luther. Of course, Jesus himself would go on to strive with and for the downtrodden, the outliers, the lost ones. Luther’s doctrine of universal priesthood ensues: of course, there is nothing to be gained by conferring the work of salvation to a few souls on behalf of the multitude, apart from the false hope of gaining our salvation this way. Salvation is a given, and all of us are supposed to look downward and work for a better world, freed from the worry of wondering about the best strategy to be saved at last, maybe, in a mysterious way. There is only one thing to be done: be saved and act as such. Indeed, this is what John Caputo apparently reads in Eckhart’s theology: “The divine quality of even the most quotidian things is released at the very moment they cease being a means to an end, at the very instant in which they are greeted without why and hailed as full of grace. But this quality is suppressed so long as temporal things are seen as a step on a ladder of ascent to eternity.”7 Of course, Martha is the one who understood something of this

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vocation, striving as she is to actively welcome what may happen instead of waiting for something to happen. Full of grace we are, since we stopped trying to get heavenward by our means, knowing full well that we are not capable of reaching the sky by ourselves. It seems so simple! But then, is it really so simple? The discussion within dialectical theology was fierce and, maybe, it should still be today. In a way, we have not solved the question of understanding how it is that we hope for the kingdom, and grace, and the Gospel, while hating all of that in the same breath, because the unconditionality of it all is unbearable. We cannot want the kingdom—yet it comes, yet we are seeing glimpses of it. The insistence of God, in John Caputo’s interpretation, means that God, indeed, does not exist, does not get out of God to reach us humans, but the event that is within the name comes knocking and provoking a reaction, a realization, a response to the problem at hand. We cannot want the kingdom, and yet. It comes. There is no guarantee that we will like it, that we will even participate in it. And yet. Yet, there is a community, there is such a thing as the church—though the Reformers insisted on the invisibility of the church, that can never be mistaken for the human institution. Yet, there is brotherhood, and sisterhood. Yet, there is faith—though we are always tempted to think of faith as something we possess, that can be weighed and transmitted and argued about. Yet, there is a relational God whose hospitality for us humans remains the deepest mystery of all, and something quite annoying in our sinful condition. The event comes as a surprise, there is always a gap between our practices and the coming of this relational God. And yet.

NOTES 1. See Rudolph Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, vol. 1 (New: York: Harper & Row, 1969). 2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, La Nature de l’Église (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1971), 69. The book is based on notes taken by Bonhoeffer’s students during his teaching on the nature of the Church in the summer of 1932. Without ever referring to the political situation of the time, it is clear that he was building a clear concept of the church as God’s creation and the body of Christ in opposition to any claim of sovereignty that might (and would) come from the political order over the church as a purely human institution. 3. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? chapter 4: What Would Jesus Deconstruct? Or, Whatever Happened to the Sermon on the Mount? 4. John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 97.

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5. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? chapter 6: The Working Church: Notes on the Future. 6. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope, 82. 7. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope, 84.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. La Nature de l’Église. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1971. Bultmann, Rudolph. Faith and Understanding, vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Caputo, John D. Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015. Caputo, John D. What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, Grand Rapis, MA: Baker Academic, 2007. Grellier, Isabelle. “L’écart, lieu et chance pour la théologie pratique.” Laval théologique et philosophique, 60:2 (2004), 269–281.

Response to Renaud-Grosbras John D. Caputo

I am very grateful to Pascale Renaud-Grosbras on several levels, not only for her contribution to the present volume but also for the excellent translation she has made of a paper of mine in Études Théologiques et Religieuses. I am also grateful to the Institut Protestant de Théologie at the University of Montpellier, where she studied. It was there, in 2015, that Prof. Elian Cuvillier conducted a conference on my work under the title of Faiblesse de Dieu et déconstruction de la théologie, which also appeared as a special issue of Études Théologiques et Religieuses. The following year saw the appearance of La faiblesse de Dieu: Une théologie de l’événement, which made The Weakness of God welcome in the French language.1 As Renaud-Grosbras points out, what I am arguing about the insistence of God, or the advent of the event taking place in the name of God, can be cast in the form of the Derrida’s analysis of hospitality. “Conditional hospitality,” where we are in charge of issuing the invitations, is low on openness to the other and high on closing the circle of the same. When we say “come” in conditional hospitality we know who and what is coming. In unconditional hospitality, by contrast, we are not in charge but are visited by the unexpected coming of the other; it is not a matter of a controlled invitation but of unexpected visitation. Derrida calls this the “possibility of the impossible,” which sounds a lot like Barth’s “impossible possibility.” That raises a problem which my good friend Richard Kearney and I have been debating for thirty years. The one knocking on our door may be an angel or a demon. Do we not need criteria? Are we to welcome evil-doers intent on doing us harm? The answer to that is that unconditional hospitality is not stupidity and it does not translate into a universal rule or maxim for our actions—like always open the door, no matter what. Deconstruction is not about rules, but about singularities (tout autre) and when Derrida says tout 270

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autre est tout autre, he is not composing a universal rule. If there is any rule, it is beyond rule, which is to keep the future open. So sometimes, depending on the singularity of the situation, not welcoming this other is the best way to keep the future open. The unconditional does not exist as such; it is always found under particular conditions in which it is a quality, an element, or a factor in a concrete decision. The unconditional is always the unconditional in these conditions. If we remove the conditions altogether, nothing happens; if the conditions are too strong, only the same happens. To allow the other to truly happen, the conditions have to be deconstructible, porous, pliable, reinventable. Derrida’s point is that to the extent that we reduce that element, that unforeseeability, that risk, we have annulled the hospitality. When it comes to the coming of “God,” the most famous, even paradigmatic case of the tout autre, then, as Renaud-Grosbras has framed it, what we call “religion” is too often an elaborate set of conditions—of “beliefs” and doctrines—which we have constructed as a condition for the arrival of God, or as I would say, of the event that is taking place in and under the name of “God.” Then “religion” looks like the host who is in charge of making up a list of guests and setting the conditions under which “God” may arrive. In theology, that God is called an “idol,” a creature of our own making. But we cannot do without conditions, otherwise nothing will happen. So “religion” serves a purpose, as a condition, but the point is to keep the conditions porous and open-ended, not to absolutize them, or rigidify them, or canonize them. As Renaud-Grosbras says, we must keep being converted to another God, as God, the event that is going on in the name of God, is “very exhausting,” and faith, like hospitality, is welcoming the impossible, which never settles in place. The non-savoir is built into faith and hospitality; without it, they are all our doing, not the doing of the other in me. So one question Renaud-Grosbras asks is, in effect, does Derrida’s unconditional, his tout autre, sound more like Barth or Bultmann? Barth or Tillich? I leave it to the Barthians to decide this, but my own sense is that while Barth will accept a great deal of what we have just said about the contingency and deconstructibility of “religion” vis-à-vis God, I think he makes several mistakes. First, by disparaging the very possibility of humankind to welcome God without God’s prior assistance Barth has mystified, mythologized, and, as Tillich shows in a decisive critique of Barth, “supernaturalized” the hermeneutic situation.2 In so doing he has undermined the possibility of hospitality. Barth deprives the host of the potens in hosti-pitality. I can only welcome the other into my own if I have my own. I cannot welcome the other to someone’s else home. Hospitality is a risk and in order to take a risk, I must have something to put at risk. I cannot say make yourself at home if I do not have a home. I must be a maître de la maison—sans maîtrise. My mastery must be without mastery; it must consist in the weak force of making welcome. Barth

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has allowed the reality of human evil, which no one denies, to be held captive by its mythological rendering in the figures of “Sin” and “Fall” and this view of human corruption, in my view, corrupts his thought. As Tillich says, Barth is not a “dialectical” thinker at all, because he has one-sidedly flattened the dialectical back and forth between God and humankind, question and answer, guest and host, hostis and potens. Radical hospitality is not a question of eradicating the host but of keeping the host radically open to the guest. Second, he absolutizes the “Christ” or “Christianity” as the sole and privileged condition under which the unconditional may visit us. This leads him into a basic mistake. God is the unconditional, but the unconditional is not God. The name of “God” is a name “we”—mostly people in the Abraham tradition; this name is far from universal—have forged in space and time to welcome the coming of the event, of the constellation of events that converge in and under this name. This is even more true for “Christ” and “Christianity,” which are time-bound symbols and names, locatable and datable historical movements, beliefs, croyances—conditional expressions—of what is going in and under the name of the unconditional (events, foi). This is a fortiori true of what we today call in Christian Latin “religion,” which is at present making itself increasingly unbelievable and increasingly getting in the way of what is of unconditional import in our lives, which is what concerns Renaud-Grosbras. She calls for the coming of a church which practices openness to the coming of the other in the form of a community of service in a church which continually reinvents itself. She distinguishes, as I do with Derrida, between our historical beliefs (like “Christianity”) and a deeper faith, and like Calvin and Luther, between the visible and the invisible church, and about the latter we do not need to exercise surveillance over the membership. God will see to that. That distinction I would reformulate, in order to avoid the supernaturalism it implies, as a distinction between the visible church, the one that actually exists, and the insistence of the church, which does not exist but is found in theopoetic space, where what is being called for in the ecclesia is figured forth. Our responsibility is for the visible one, to close the gap between the two, to lend existence to what insists, and to convert insistence into existence. The task is to be the hospitality of which we speak, to be the community of service which Renaud-Grosbras is describing, which Bonhoeffer called “being for others.” I love her citation of the line from Luther that God on high on has nowhere to look than down below, and the lower things are, the better God sees. It is our grace that God is farsighted! Oui, oui to her citation of Eckhart’s “Martha, Martha,” who has two gifts, active and contemplative. Theopoetics, I would say, must be theopraxis. The name of God is the name of a call for us to make the kingdom come true in the only world that actually exists. This is asking a lot of the visible church, in France or the United States, and of religion generally, and it is far from

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clear that it is up to the task. The challenge the church faces today is whether we have reached the point where the way to keep the future open to what is coming in the name of God is to bid adieu to religion, the word and the thing, and to turn to other places in the culture—say the work of art—which look a good deal more hospitable to the tout autre than does religion. NOTES 1. “L’existance de Dieu: réconcilier le monde avec Dieu,” trans. Pascale RenaudGrosbras, Études Théologiques et Religieuses, 94:1 (2019), 37–54. The special issue on my work is Études Théologiques et Religieuses, 90 3 (2015). The translation of The Weakness of God is La faiblesse de Dieu: Une Théologie de l’événement, trans. John E. Jackson (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016). 2. Paul Tillich, “What Is Wrong with the ‘Dialectic’ Theology?” in Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, ed. Mark Kline Taylor (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 104–15.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. “L’existance de Dieu: réconcilier le monde avec Dieu.” Translated by Pascale Renaud-Grosbras. Études Théologiques et Religieuses, 94:1 (2019), 37–54. Caputo, John D. La faiblesse de Dieu: Une Théologie de l’événement. Translated by John E. Jackson. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016. Tillich, Paul. “What Is Wrong with the ‘Dialectic’ Theology?” In Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, edited by Mark Kline Taylor, 104–15. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991.

Chapter 13

Care and Decay A Phenomenology of the Queer Body (with Constant Reference to the HIV-Positive Flesh) Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere

What happened to Caputo’s flesh? After making it the central category of an “antiphenomenology” of the body in Against Ethics, briefly reprised in Demythologizing Heidegger and The Weakness of God, the so-called flesh disappears from Caputo’s toolbox. Perhaps he just wasn’t sufficiently interested in human embodiment to provide it with a detailed account.1 Yet, with the follow-up to The Weakness of God having been announced as The Weakness of Flesh, this seems unlikely.2 What, then, happens with the flesh? I answer this question by developing Caputo’s account of human embodiment, for his antiphenomenology reveals something that phenomenology obscures: neither ownmost body (Leib) nor material body (Körper), flesh (Fleisch) indicates how the body’s materiality constitutes “the fix I find myself in,” what Richard Kearney calls “a carnal Befindlichkeit” and Caputo understands as “obligation’s body.”3 Yet, I suggest, the flesh does not exhaust the human experience of embodiment: Caputo understands the body as decaying flesh (e.g., the indignity of illness), but this experience alone does not account for its humanity (i.e., its status as site of obligation). Consequently, I argue that Caputo’s analysis of the flesh ought to be supplemented by a hermeneutics of care in which decaying flesh is regarded with the dignity that makes it into a human body (i.e., an obliging body). Something thus certainly happens with Caputo’s flesh, but it is the event of human existence rather than God, requiring a hermeneutics instead of a theology. I am thus concerned with the early Caputo, with the philosopher before he—in the inimitable words of Catherine Keller—came “out of the closet” as a theologian. Yet, this closeted Caputo is already magnificently queer: 275

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his antiphenomenology is not something other than phenomenology, but the phenomenology of an experience (Fleisch) marginalized by normative phenomenological conceptions of embodiment (Leib or Körper). In short, antiphenomenology is queer phenomenology. The proposed hermeneutics of care is then likewise queer because it proceeds—at Caputo’s insistence— from an argumentum ad misericordiam: a phenomenology of the queer body (Fleisch) with constant reference to its paradigmatic example of HIV-positive flesh (Verwesung).4

QUEERNESS In Against Ethics, which outlines a “poetics of obligation” paralleling Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity (i.e., an ontology of human existence from the perspective of “my Befindlichkeit, the fix I find myself in”),5 Caputo reaches a point requiring a “phenomenology of the body.” Yet, “with no little regret,” he feels unable to provide it: “the poetics of obligation” supposedly “break with phenomenology,” and thus takes “its stand not only ‘against ethics’,” but also “against phenomenology,” since “phenomenology’s ‘body’ is very much a philosophical creature.” He explains: Philosophy’s body . . . is an active, athletic, healthy, erect, white male body, sexually able and unambiguously gendered, well-born, well-bred, and well-buried, a corpus sanum cut to fit a mens sana in the felicity of being-in-the-world. . . . But the bodies of . . . lepers and the man with the withered hand, are disfigured, diseased, unburied. . . . A little ugly and unpleasant, they fall outside the classical paradigm of propriety and comely form.6

That paradigm of propriety is rooted in Husserl, whose account of embodiment is bidimensional: he distinguishes the body as material worldly object (Körper) from the lived-experience of said body as “reduced to what is included in my ownness” (Leib).7 The former is the object of experience, the latter its subject. The lived-body is my own insofar as it shows up in lived-experience and determines how experience is lived: since everything appears as oriented somehow, to the left or right of me, my subjective body has “the unique distinction of bearing in itself the zero point of all these orientations.”8 The “phenomenological body” is then only the Leib, whose “propriety” is expressed by Husserl in three ways: it constitutes “what is peculiarly my own” first as everything “non-alien”9 (self-awareness); second, as “the ultimate central here” (spatial awareness); third, as one’s “‘faculty’ (the ‘I can’) to freely move this Body . . . and to perceive an external world by means of it”10 (kinaesthetic awareness). It

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is in these three ways that the world is constituted through the body, that things are given to consciousness in their “personal (leibhaften) actuality.”11 To the phenomenological description of the lived-body (Leib), what we can now call the ownmost body or body proper (along with the French who sometimes speak of le corps propre),12 Caputo opposes his “antiphenomenological” account of embodiment, namely a description of what is bracketed in the reduction to ownness: Phenomenology . . . directs its attention to the way that world is constituted . . . by the “agent body,” which always seems to be in excellent health, quite well rested, fresh from a trip to the islands. Phenomenology favors the good form of le corps propre, by which I mean not the sphere of “ownness” but a “proper” body, a body with propriety and decorum, dignity and grace (with just a touch of tan). But [I] move . . . away from beautiful Greek bodies to malformed, disfigured, diseased, disabled . . . bodies, bodies buried alive, or dead bodies left to rot unburied; away from processes of constitution and building up toward breakdown and deconstitution. [I] traffic with the anti-ideals of le corps impropre . . . as the subject matter of a kind of antiphénoménologie de l’impropriété.13

The distinction between ownmost body and proper or agent body is less significant than it appears. The proper or agent body is the coincidence of self with body in an “embrace without distance”14 (i.e., a body that acts, looks, and feels exactly as I want it to) and therefore identical to the ownmost body “‘in’ which I ‘rule and govern’ immediately.”15 Phenomenology thus reduces the body to what belongs to my ownness, namely selfhood deployed in action: a body as “organ of the soul,”16 not distracting from the self it houses, that is well-formed, beautiful, and healthy (“Health is life lived in the silence of the organs,” a French physician once said).17 Caputo nevertheless helpfully underlines that not only is le corps propre (Leib) the “ownmost body” or “body proper” (i.e., self-deployment), phenomenology also takes it as the “proper body” (i.e., the norm): phenomenology addresses the body as constituting world and facilitating self-expression, but immediately ends when these are instead inhibited by my embodied condition (e.g., through illness or malformation).18 Rather than taking recourse to the French, we can then say that in examining “the bodies that have always fallen before phenomenology’s epochē” or reduction to ownness, Caputo aims at embodiment in its queerness, namely its deviation from the norm: the body insofar as it is not “hale and whole, male and muscular, white and western.”19 After all, queer theory understands queer as meaning “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” what Caputo describes as “marginalized by the mainstream” or “an-archical, outside the arche.”20

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Phenomenological French is further best avoided since it renders Caputo’s account confusing: in presenting his “antiphenomenology” as operating “a reduction to flesh,” he assembles his alternative using two profoundly phenomenological notions. The French, after all, use “flesh” (chair) to refer to the phenomenological body (Leib),21 making it difficult to see how Caputo can speak of “the impropriety of the flesh” as “an antiphenomenological category.” Fortunately, we still have German: “Flesh is Fleisch,” Caputo clarifies, it “does not mean intertwining but tear,” for “flesh is what can be cut up, sliced and burnt—like meat.” Fleisch means bodily tissues, the “meaty materiality” of the Leibkörper.22 For Caputo, it refers to a body that is no longer able to function transcendentally as subject of intentional constitution: “Flesh is what happens to a body . . . that suffers the violent loss of its world.”23 Specifically, flesh is a body whose illness or malformation renders it unable to execute the phenomenologically relevant bodily functions (e.g., providing the zero point of orientations): the “body become flesh is deprived of the ability to constitute and synthesize, to assimilate what it encounters.”24 In becoming flesh, the body is extracted from the world as equipmental totality, since its queerness does not fit the normative definition of the ideal(ized) body: “Their hands do not move with prereflective ease along the tracks of the zuhanden world, because their hands are withered, crippled, maimed, or missing.”25 As Didier Franck might put it: if Dasein does not have hands, the being of the being that it is cannot be considered being-at-hand.26 As Caputo puts it: “The hand that swings a hammer and drives a nail is part of a body agent, the hand that caresses or is nailed to a cross is flesh.”27 As an antiphenomenological category, Caputo’s flesh (Fleisch) is then distinct from—for example and despite his own insistence—Michel Henry’s flesh (chair): the latter indicates how “the Self and the flesh go together” (carnal ipseity),28 while the former indicates the impropriety of flesh (carnal queerness). What, then, of said “reduction” to flesh? It, too, denotes an antiphenomenological category through a profoundly phenomenological term: The reduction to flesh is . . . not a return to primal presence but . . . a breakdown before an object is reached . . . which leaves us not with the purity of a pristine element but with the confusion and density of something murky and gross. . . . This is not a reduction in the sense of the leading back (re-ducere) to a primal subject, but a reduction in the sense of a diminishing or subtraction or less.29

Caputo’s reduction does not lead to anything evident, inevitably always selfevident. “Flesh is not an arche,” he insists, “but the anarchy that fills the philosophical body and disrupts its archic-organic functions.” Consequently, he concludes: “The reduction to flesh is a reduction to chaos and confusion. This reduction is the unbecoming of the world, its breakdown and loss of organization.”30 One nevertheless wonders, not only whether this anarchy

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is foreign to Husserl’s framework,31 but also whether phenomenology can be abandoned through the preeminently phenomenological gesture. Like the “quasiphenomenology” of his later theological investigations, Caputo’s “antiphenomenology” therefore does not abandon phenomenological description, but pursues it by different means: “against phenomenology, although never in opposition simpliciter.”32 Having recovered these two phenomenological categories as antiphenomenological ones, Caputo’s antiphénoménologie de l’impropriété translates to phenomenology of queerness (i.e., abnormality): the reduction to flesh (Fleisch) is not a reduction to “the flesh” (la chair), but rather a reduction of the corporeal norm (Leib)—i.e., the normativity of good health and form. Caputo’s “antiphenomenology” thus responds to a preeminently phenomenological exigency, namely the reduction’s demand of bracketing all normativity belonging to the natural attitude: phenomenology is always already queer phenomenology. I hope he will therefore forgive me for presenting his account of the body-become-flesh as a phenomenology of decay (albeit a queer one). DECAY What, then, does the experience of flesh consist in? Caputo frames it as that of suffering rather than agency: The . . . loss of the world, the intensity of the pain, the reduction of a living, bodily agent to the indignity of fleshy hyle. . . . Flesh is but the stuff of a body. . . . The suffering is situated in the reduction to the flesh. The agent body supersedes its pain . . . and only later, after the exertion, realizes it. . . . That is when it sinks back into flesh. . . . The disasters of the flesh are situated in the shattered, shipwrecked intentionality, in the breakdown and collapse of being-in-the-world. In suffering, the body contracts upon itself, curls up within itself . . . and turns itself into flesh. In suffering, the body contracts into the immanence of flesh.33

Thus, as breakdown of the body’s phenomenological functioning, the flesh is experienced in its organic dysfunction: the flesh emerges from the agent body only when that body “dysfunctions” and resists reduction to the acting self, when my organs no longer keep silent but start to sputter (what Drew Leder calls “the dys-appearing body”).34 “The flesh is not the ear that hears,” Caputo illustrates, but “the ear of the man born deaf,” namely: the ear that does not perform its organic-phenomenological function of hearing and is thus reduced to meaty tissue. Flesh is then achieved through illness or disease (dys- in Greek meaning ill): “Disease carries out the reduction to the flesh” since “disease reduces a person to an exhausted heap, sunk into a sofa or a

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bed, helpless.” Indeed, flesh is not simply meaty material, but rotting tissue and infected fluids; not simply foreign to selfhood, but destructive of it; not simply queer, but grotesque—flesh is humiliation (sarx). Consider Caputo’s unsettling description of this reduction: Flesh is not the dazzling complexity of the neurological system . . . [but] the brain that has been invaded by a tumor, leaving a man or woman in terror and confusion, causing disequilibrium, throbbing headaches, a humiliating loss of memory, . . . impairing speech, hearing, sight. Flesh is felt in the inflammation, the infection that reduces the brain to its fleshy substance, to its gross materiality. An infection divests a distinguished woman of her expertise . . . and dignity. It reduces a once brilliant . . . person to an undignified shadow of her former self, it reduces her to the indignity of the flesh.35

Clearly, only certain diseases carry out this reduction: my nose is never more apparent to me than when a cold blocks it and obstructs my body’s ordinary respiratory function; yet, I am not thereby diminished in myself, my action is not impaired, I am not humiliated. Instead, the diseases giving us (over to) flesh are degenerative diseases, which entail a progressive loss of function that deprives us of our propriety: robbing us of normal functioning and thereby turning us into indecorous, improper, diminished versions of ourselves. To suffer flesh is an indignity, something normally considered unworthy of a human being. The flesh is thus not merely ill but experienced as decay (what Caputo calls “consumption” or “withering”): the body’s dehumanizing decline, its offputting decomposition, a person hollowed out from the inside, wasting away and shriveling up into themselves, into a husk of their former self. If the phenomenology of ownness operates according to the reflexivity of touch (selftouch), the phenomenology of queerness operates according to the reflexivity of eating (self-consumption): while the body circumscribes ownness in being “simultaneously toucher and touched” (Maldiney),36 the queerness circumscribed by flesh results from the fact that “we who eat are ourselves eaten,” that “what is carnivorous is always carnality” (Caputo).37 I nevertheless stick to “decay” here since Caputo discusses this experience paradigmatically as the indignity of the body’s degeneration in illness: the body consuming itself, breaking down its functioning organs into decaying tissues (Fleisch).

INDIGNITY Caputo offers two “archi-diseases” as examples: the flesh indicates how the “bodies of lepers and, today, of the victims of AIDS are ‘consumed’ and

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eaten away. The paradigmatic diseases are diseases of consumed flesh.” He explains: Flesh feeding on flesh, on itself, until the flesh is consumed. . . . Leprosy or plague, in the ancient world, cancer or AIDS today, are gruesome figures of consumption, of flesh being eaten away, hollowed out and consumed. Sunken eyes, limbs of skin and bones, without flesh, with withered, withering flesh. These are preeminently, paradigmatically diseases of the flesh. . . . Withering away in a bed, the death of the AIDS victim/leper, is . . . self-consuming, unheimlich, decomposing flesh, a disgusting Ver-wesung.38

Caputo’s flesh is always “leprous, AIDS-afflicted flesh” or “leprous, HIVpositive flesh.”39 This is best (if controversially) captured by Hervé Guibert’s description of his AIDS-ridden body as an “emaciated body” (corps décharne), the one he “encountered every morning, an Auschwitzian exhibit in the full-length bathroom mirror.”40 Flesh indicates a body so thin and skeletal, so diminished because there is so much less of it, so much less flesh to it, that it can no longer function properly as body (Leib). Guibert’s references to cannibalism should then perhaps be understood as tying this emaciation into Caputo’s carnal reversibility: “I have so little flesh now on my own bones . . . that I would gladly become a cannibal. . . . I would like to eat raw and living flesh, warm, sweet and foul.”41 Let us therefore consider this HIV-positive flesh in greater detail. Guibert’s Le protocole compassionnel describes the degeneration of the author’s own(most) body into AIDS-afflicted flesh as a loss of ordinary bodily functions like movement: Every day I lose a movement I’d still been able to make the night before, in agony just lifting my arm to do my hair . . . , putting an arm into a sleeve . . . , long since unable to run to catch a bus . . . , uncork a bottle of champagne . . . , I was from now on incapable of performing any of these movements . . . , the body of an old man took possession of my thirty-five-year-old man’s body.42

Phenomenologically, the body (Leib) breaking itself down into fleshy tissue (Fleisch) is accomplished here in two ways. First, by the collapse of the body as I can, since the ill-body is no longer experienced as Husserl’s “resistanceless doing of things, i.e., a consciousness of an ability that meets no resistance.”43 Second, the body therefore no longer circumscribes the sphere of ownness: Guibert’s body has grown old prior to Guibert himself. As Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe’s Corps à corps puts this: “imposters have taken over my body,” where “I am at home (chez moi), in my ownmost body.”44 Instead of circumscribing “what is peculiarly my own” as “non-alien,”45 AIDS-afflicted flesh thus experiences how “our body itself risks becoming foreign to us.”46

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Yet, like leprosy, AIDS is no ordinary illness. It is decay and degeneration not only of self but of human dignity—it involves depersonalization: “the leper’s exclusion,” Foucault reminds us, consisted in “a distancing” or “no contact between one individual (or a group of individuals) and another” that “involved casting these individuals out” into an “external world beyond the town’s walls, beyond the limits of the community” and thus “into outer darkness.”47 The leprous or HIV-positive flesh is then unable to constitute a world, not simply because the flesh no longer functions as a body should; but rather because, in its deviation from the norm, the flesh loses its status of human body and is therefore excluded from the world itself: “leprosy,” which Caputo considers “an ancient form of AIDS,” is “disease itself” or “contagion itself,” and thus “everything that requires exclusion.”48 This deviancy of the HIVpositive flesh leads Dreuilhe to conclude that “AIDS is perhaps primarily a mental illness” like “nervous depression,” not because “the virus can affect our brain,” but because it short-circuits constituting consciousness: “the isolation and anxiety it plunges us in make aliens out of us. . . . The irreality of the non-AIDS universe of healthy people leads me to doubt my senses and their good sense.”49 HIV breaks down the body’s transcendental functioning due to the AIDS-afflicted body’s deviation from the norm and its consequent exclusion from the world. Dreuilhe captures this indignity, this depersonalization of the ill body, more vividly: “Our corpses are burnt or buried on the sly by recalcitrant staff. . . . Even alive, we are no longer touched except with gloves, society’s latest humiliating and sadistic discovery. I am experiencing the disrooting (déracinement) of the AIDS community, its sudden isolation from the body politic (corps social).”50 In this state of being disrooted, the person with AIDS finds themselves in a similar fix as Abraham—the guide to Caputo’s Against Ethics—namely: isolation from the world within it.51

CARE Caputo’s account ends at this point of total isolation from a world that can no longer be constituted through the body-become-flesh. Yet, this remains far from a complete analysis of human embodiment and contains certain odd exaggerations: Caputo has rightly identified as flesh a dimension of embodiment obscured by phenomenology’s reduction to ownness, namely “the ear of the man born deaf,” but not established why this would equal “the ear of Van Gogh, the missing one, the one he cut off—like a piece of meat or a caruncle (caro, carnis).”52 Surely, the dysfunctioning bodily tissue (Fleisch) that is nevertheless integral to a living human body (Leibkörper) appears differently from the dead flesh cut off from it? Likewise, does the human body laid low by illness on a hospital bed not appear differently from a carcass similarly

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spread out on a butcher’s block? Caputo’s account leaves a crucial question unanswered: what makes this flesh human? We can again specify this question through the HIV-positive flesh. Caputo often speaks—well-meaningly—of “the victims of AIDS as the new lepers.”53 Now, not to insist on the political correctness of a bygone era, but in speaking of victims rather than the preferred “people with AIDS” (PWAs),54 Caputo reveals something about how he regards these bodies: the person to whom the AIDS-afflicted body belongs is dissolved entirely in its dysfunction, its ill-ness, and thus in the decay of HIV-positive flesh. Reviewing a series of photographs of people with AIDS, William Olander—a curator at MoMA who himself died of AIDS—eloquently captures the problem with this approach: The majority of the sitters are shown alone; many are in hospital . . . , sick, in bed. . . . Only four are shown with male lovers or friends. For the photographer, “The thing that became very compelling was knowing the people—knowing them as individuals.” For the viewer, however, there is little to know other than their illness. . . . Not one is shown in a work environment. . . . None of the sitters is identified. They have no identities other than as victims of AIDS.55

Caputo’s HIV-positive flesh is thus no longer a person, a living and breathing human being; instead, it is illness itself, decay itself, already almost a corpse. “In talking about PWAs as if they are already dead,” Dreuilhe explains, Caputo has “lost sight of our humanity”56—not that he denies it, but he cannot account for it. The “disqualification” of lepers, Foucault explains, likewise meant that “they entered death . . . and they departed for the foreign, external world.”57 Caputo apparently ignores Sartre’s insistence that “we cannot perceive the Other’s body as flesh, as . . . an isolated object having purely external relations with other thises. That is true only for a corpse.” For the suffering bodybecome-flesh, even in its inability to constitute a world, nevertheless takes up space within that world: “the Other’s body as flesh is immediately given” only “in a situation which is synthetically organized around it” as “a body in situation.”58 The isolation of Caputo’s flesh is foreign to human embodiment, including the AIDS-afflicted body: regardless of their ability to constitute it for themselves, people with AIDS remain people thanks to their situation in a world of friends, family, doctors, and nurses—ensuring that the indignity of illness never fully amounts to a loss of humanity (i.e., the ontological dignity securing personhood). Caputo thus cannot account for how this flesh appears as a human and living body to others: the “anarchy of the flesh” does not explain why we regard these bodily tissues (Fleisch) as a body on the operating table (chair) but as meat on the butcher’s block (viande).

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This question concerns, not the body’s own materiality, but the intentionality with which it is brought into view by others: the regard we have for ill and disfigured bodies. Considering the body in these terms, Emmanuel Falque complements Caputo’s account: “Between Leib and Körper . . . sits caro (in Latin), Fleisch (in German) or flesh (in English),” denoting “when the patient can no longer say anything, but only suffer.” Yet, it must be distinguished from “meat” (viande) since “the human being, living and suffering, is a matter of ‘living flesh’ rather than ‘dead flesh’.”59 Like Caputo, Falque considers the clinical body—the reclining body laid low by illness (klinein)—but emphasizes the clinical context as a situation where the body, “anchored in its matter” (carnality), is nevertheless “alternatively brought into view according to its manner” (humanity). Indeed, Falque’s essay on the body, subtitled “Palliative Care and Philosophy,” is based on an internship at a hospice: what he encountered there was not a pile of decaying flesh, but people being cared for. He explains: But . . . this body . . . remains human—with the exception of extreme situations of intentional dehumanisation. . . . Not that, in periods of radical suffering, the so-called “human body” would no longer be animal, . . . vegetal, . . . or mineral (like a cadaver), but a community . . . does not similarly attach itself to what is of the order of humanity and to what is not. There is a kind of “empathy decidedupon” in the relationship between two human beings, and in care especially. When bodies touch, . . . where the bodily tissues (les chairs) open-up, movements for the patients are always accompanied by verbal expressions for the caregivers, indicating that animality always awaits being humanised, or at least regarded differently. There is thus animality—on a hospital bed certainly, but also on the operating table . . . or on a cross—but we also see there humanity.60

Care, comprising an intentionality of its own, collects and maintains the decaying flesh in its bodily character—its humanity and dignity: bodies whose flesh is worthy of care. Against Caputo, Falque therefore proposes an “ethics” of embodiment, but in a Spinozistic rather than Hegelian sense: namely, an ethology of embodiment, a description of flesh in the situation making it into a human body.61 For the queer body, this concerns the care allowing HIV-positive flesh to belong to a person with AIDS: “In the ‘bodyto-body’ (corps-à-corps) of care or love,” Falque writes, the flesh (Fleisch) “is not reduced to the ‘body,’ and even less to meat (viande), . . . not because it isn’t either of these, but because this shared texture is inhabited by a regard . . . capable of humanising it.”62 AIDS literature is replete with illustrations of this intentionality of care, the regard for the ill that aims at maintaining their dignity during decay, the clinical-social horizon against which flesh appears as human body: “strangers become immediately familiar to me, and recount their life in detail, their

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past sexual practices,” Dreuilhe writes, “once we discover that we have the same diarrhoea due to a shared parasite.”63 Two people with AIDS are linked by their shared HIV-positive flesh; yet, the resulting familiarity is not established by the “meaty materiality” of this flesh alone, but primarily by the care for it: through my care for or concern about my flesh (my own decaying body), I am not only likewise concerned about someone else’s (who shares my predicament), but interaction between us two also becomes meaningful (conversation about how we respectively manage our shared predicament)— rotting pieces of meat on a butcher’s block have no reason to discuss their shared situation. Caputo approaches this account of care for and through flesh in his retelling of Antigone: Antigone . . . attends to her brother, to his sensuous immediacy, to his dead body, lest he/it become carrion (caro, flesh), food for the beasts. . . . Her care (Sorge) is not for Being but for her brother’s body. . . . Antigone is a being of flesh. She is tied to a man who is not her lover and not her son, but who is only her flesh, her brother.64

Antigone indeed cares for her brother’s body, but precisely by raising up his flesh—his meaty materiality—to the dignity of humanity: one buries bodies, not pieces of meat; burial maintains dead flesh as a human body through care’s refusal to let it become meat or carrion. Antigone and her brother are then not primarily linked by flesh, by their genes, but by care, that is, by love: care for one’s own flesh and therefore also care for those that share this predicament. A better example is provided by Guibert’s À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie. That friend is Michel Foucault, whose final months the book recounts. Guibert wonders what right he has to publicize the indignity of his famous friend’s predicament, until he realizes that it is equally his own: “I was completely entitled to do this since it wasn’t so much my friend’s last agony I was describing as it was my own,” for “besides being bound by friendship, we would share the same fate in death” (i.e., their shared predicament of HIVpositive flesh).65 Guibert’s flesh is likewise worldless, disfigured, and repulsive; yet, it is not isolated: the indignity of flesh arises, not from its decaying materiality, but from how it forms the conduit for care. “That was probably the hardest thing to bear,” he writes, “to feel one’s friend, one’s brother, so broken by what was happening to him—that was physically revolting.”66 Likewise, it is his world that disintegrates when faced, not with his own suffering, but with his friend’s decaying flesh: In the hospital courtyard, flooded with a June sunshine that cruelly mocked unhappiness, I understood . . . that [Michel] was going to die . . . a certainty that disfigured me in the eyes of passersby, for my face disintegrated, washed away

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by my tears and shattered into fragments by my cries, I was crazed with grief, I was Munch’s The Scream.67

Guibert’s inability to synthesize what he encounters indeed results from a disfigurement of his body, a defacement; but one accomplished by care for the flesh rather than its decay, or—more precisely—by (care for) his friend’s decaying flesh rather than his own. If there is, then, a reversibility to flesh, it is neither touching (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Maldiney) nor eating (Caputo), but caring: in caring for disfigured flesh, I risk being disfigured myself; in caring for decaying flesh, I am myself liable to be reduced to decaying flesh. “Under the circumstances,” Guibert writes from his hospital bed, “it’s better to remain a human being than a bloody pancake.”68 As an account of human embodiment, Caputo’s phenomenology of decaying flesh then demands a hermeneutics of care: decaying flesh is only a human and obliging body when interpreted against the intentional horizon of care, when regarded as a person rather than just a bloody pancake. Caputo rightly insists that “obligation issues from the figure of the disfigured flesh,” but forgets what Kant observed so insightfully, namely that obligation only obliges as result and marker of human dignity; that if “the flesh of the other . . . commands my respect” and “elicits from me a certain ‘regard’,” it is that of personhood.69 The obligation issuing from the disfigured and defaced body-become-flesh is that of being regarded as a human body worthy of the name: embodiment condemns us to the indignity of an existence in decaying flesh and only the possibility—indeed, the obligation—of care secures the humanity of this existence. This approaches “care” (cura) as the young Heidegger understands it, namely “to restore the decay” (reficere ruinam) of life in its “deformed state” (deformis irruebam).70 Instead of wallowing in the anarchy of the flesh, a hermeneutics of care confronts this fact of our embodiment circumscribing finitude as decaying flesh: it consists in what Caputo once considered the “liberating . . . not dehumanizing” effort of “‘facing up’ to the limits of our situation” (embodiment), namely “the original difficulty of our lives” (decay).71 This hermeneutics is thus integral to Caputo’s project, making its absence even more curious. Caputo’s Demythologizing Heidegger nevertheless identifies its necessity in a critique of Heidegger: though always “responsive to the Sorge, the care for one’s being-in-the-world,” he “missed the cura” as “caring for the flesh of the other,” since “cura also means healing . . . the other’s pain and afflicted flesh.”72 Yet, Caputo’s account remains oddly complicit with the “missed opportunity” of Heidegger’s existential ontology, for in discussing clinical phenomena while ignoring their clinical situation, Caputo equally overlooks “the praxis of afflicted flesh” he now identifies as crucial: “the thematics of healing gestures” as rooted in “the pain of the other” that “calls for

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healing, curing, cura,” like “healing withered hands.” Decay (ruina) already implies care (cura) as the obligation issuing “from afflicted flesh” and requiring an “ethics of mercy.”73 This oversight results from Caputo’s insistence that the suffering of decaying flesh exhaustively accounts for obligation. Yet, as I suggested, it is not decay itself that obliges me, but its being suffered by a being like myself, by a person who shares my predicament of decaying flesh in virtue of which I am able to regard them as I do myself and project my care-for-myself onto them as care-for-the-other (i.e., care-for-decayingflesh).74 Put differently, Caputo’s account neglects the regard that makes an obliging body out of decaying tissues (Fleisch): this regard explains why, though equally decaying, butchered meat (viande) does not appear or oblige in the same way as anesthetized flesh (chair). What happens to Caputo’s flesh? To put this as ironically as possible, the author of Against Ethics never really thought ruina all the way through.

NOTES 1. Note Caputo’s curious absence from Kearney and Treanor (eds.), Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham UP, 2015). 2. John D. Caputo, “Praying for an Earthier Jesus: A Theology of Flesh,” in I More Than Others: Responses to Evil and Suffering, ed. Eric R. Serverance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 7. 3. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 25, 212–19; Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 21. 4. Caputo, Against Ethics, 113–17, 49, 59. 5. Caputo, Against Ethics, 25. 6. Caputo, Against Ethics, 195. 7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 97. 8. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989), 158. 9. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 98. 10. Husserl, Ideas II, 158, 254. 11. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hauge: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 43. 12. Though not as uniformly as Caputo suggests: compare Levinas’ 1947 translation of Leib in the Cartesianische Meditationen (corps organique) to de Launay’s 1994 version (corps propre organique), or consider Ricœur’s translation of Ideen II (Leib as chair and Leibkörper as corps propre). 13. Caputo, Against Ethics, 195.

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14. Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015), 120. 15. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 97. 16. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), 131. 17. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone, 1991), 91. 18. Or is contorted to accommodate these experiences—for example, MerleauPonty on phantom limbs in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1958), 93–94. 19. John D. Caputo, “Bodies without Flesh: Overcoming the Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology,” in Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, ed. Katherine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2012), 81. 20. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 62; John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 62–63. 21. Summarized by Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), 319–29; criticized by Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 216–43. Against Ethics predates On Touching, yet Caputo surprisingly makes no reference to it in later works either. 22. Caputo, Against Ethics, 196–99, 202. Caputo probably understands flesh with Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2003), 22: “Meat (viande) is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally.” One wonders, however, why Caputo ignores these phenomenological nuances: “I distinguish ‘flesh’ (sarx, caro, chair, Fleish) from ‘body’ (soma, corpus, Leib)” (“Bodies without Flesh,” 81)—is the omission of a French word for “body” really just an oversight? 23. Caputo, Against Ethics, 196. 24. Caputo, Against Ethics, 207. 25. Caputo, Against Ethics, 203. 26. Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Minuit, 1986). 27. John D. Caputo, “Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 12, no. 1 (2007): 75. 28. Michel Henry, “Incarnation,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 135. 29. Caputo, Against Ethics, 211–12. 30. Caputo, Against Ethics, 207–8. 31. As the Cartesian Meditations’ “mute experience” (77) or as Caputo himself suggests in Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 36–59. 32. Caputo, Against Ethics, 201. 33. Caputo, Against Ethics, 206. 34. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990), 69–99. 35. Caputo, Against Ethics, 207–8. 36. Henri Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie (Grenoble: Million, 2007), 137.

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37. Caputo, Against Ethics, 198–200. 38. Caputo, Against Ethics, 198–9. Caputo is writing in 1993 before the introduction of effective antiretroviral therapy, which arguably disentangles the experience of HIV/AIDS from that of decay. 39. Caputo, Against Ethics, 149; Demythologizing Heidegger, 68. 40. Hervé Guibert, The Compassion Protocol (New York: Braziller, 1994), 6 (translation modified throughout). 41. Guibert, The Compassion Protocol, 74. 42. Guibert, The Compassion Protocol, 1–2. 43. Husserl, Ideas II, 270. 44. Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, Corps à corps: Journal de SIDA (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 17. 45. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 95/126. 46. Dreuilhe, Corps à corps, 112. 47. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (London: Verso, 2003), 43. 48. Caputo, Against Ethics, 156. 49. Dreuilhe, Corps à corps, 14. 50. Dreuilhe, Corps à corps, 164. 51. Caputo, Against Ethics, 8–15. 52. Caputo, Against Ethics, 207. 53. Other examples include: John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), 103; Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age (London: Penguin, 2014), 55; What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Ada: Baker Academic, 2007), 151n37; Demythologising Heidegger, 68. 54. Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords,” October 43 (1987): 26–7. 55. Quoted in Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 93. 56. Dreuilhe, Corps à corps, 12. 57. Foucault, Abnormal, 43. 58. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 344. 59. Emmanuel Falque, “Éthique du corps épandu: Soins palliatifs et philosophie,” in Éthique du corps épandu suivi de Une chair épandue sur le divan (Paris: Cerf, 2018), 61. 60. Falque, “Éthique,” 19–20. 61. Falque, “Éthique,” 52. 62. Falque, “Éthique,” 65. 63. Dreuilhe, Corps à corps, 112. 64. Caputo, Against Ethics, 166–8. 65. Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2020), 101. 66. Guibert, To the Friend, 143. 67. Guibert, To the Friend, 102–3.

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68. Hervé Guibert, Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary (New York: Fordham UP, 2016). 69. Caputo, Against Ethics, 214–6. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 434. 70. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010), 184, 151. 71. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 97. 72. Caputo, Demythologising Heidegger, 72. 73. Caputo, Demythologising Heidegger, 57–68. 74. Of course, this regard extends to animal suffering, just like we ignore our obligations to other people by regarding them as others. My proposal has no part in a metaphysics of essence and therefore consists, not in a normative ethics, but in a queer phenomenology of regard: an analysis how regard for our fellow beings shapes experience.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Caputo, John D. Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Caputo, John D. “Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 12, no. 1 (2007): 73–86. Caputo, John D. “Bodies without Flesh: Overcoming the Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology.” In Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, edited by Katherine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare, 79–94. London: Routledge, 2012. Caputo, John D. Demythologizing Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Caputo, John D. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001. Caputo, John D. “Praying for an Earthier Jesus: A Theology of Flesh.” In I More Than Others: Responses to Evil and Suffering, edited by Eric R. Severson, 6–27. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Caputo, John D. Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age. London: Penguin, 2014. Caputo, John D. What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. Ada: Baker Academic, 2007. Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2003.

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Derrida, Jacques. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Dreuilhe, Alain Emmanuel. Corps à corps: Journal de SIDA. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Falque, Emmanuel. “Éthique du corps épandu: Soins palliatifs et philosophie.” In Éthique du corps épandu suivi de Une chair épandue sur le divan. Paris: Cerf, 2018. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. London: Verso, 2003. Franck, Didier. Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Franck, Didier. Heidegger et le problème de l’espace. Paris: Minuit, 1986. Grover, Jan Zita. “AIDS: Keywords.” October 43 (1987): 17–30. Guibert, Hervé. Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. Guibert, Hervé. The Compassion Protocol. New York: Braziller, 1994. Guibert, Hervé. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2020. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Henry, Michel. “Incarnation.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 128–39. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Henry, Michel. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. The Hauge: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Kearney, Richard. “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, 15–56. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990. Maldiney, Henri. Penser l’homme et la folie. Grenoble: Million, 2007. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1958. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Response to Cassidy-Deketelaere John D. Caputo

I was hoping no one would notice. Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere has me. I promised to follow up The Weakness of God with a “theology of the flesh.” I even taught a graduate course in fall 2008 at Syracuse University on the topic, which is available on my website.1 I had every intention to do that, but it got deflected by the project of unfolding a weak or radical theology, which has also led me to examine the “posthuman” critique of flesh, which means to “reduce” flesh not phenomenologically but entirely. But Cassidy-Deketelaere is right. I am guilty as charged. I said I would do it and I did not. I have given up on living forever, but I would not mind being reincarnated a couple of times, at least once as a quantum physicist and now, I realize, once more to finish this work. In the meantime, I am grateful to Cassidy-Deketelaere for picking up my slack and for the interesting extension he proposes, which I think a fruitful expansion of what I said. But if I agree with him that this project is incomplete, I do not quite agree with what he thinks is missing. I occasionally call my work an anti-phenomenology or a quasi-phenomenology, but that is mostly a strategy, a bit of impishness, a taunt, prompted by Lyotard, Levinas, and Derrida, to bring home a point; it is in the same spirit that I also spoke of an anti-ethics, against ethics. I would be more likely to say today it is a “radical phenomenology” and an inquiry into the “ethicity of ethics.” The breakdown of phenomenology yields to a phenomenology of breakdown; what is invisible to phenomenology produces a phenomenology of the invisible. Call it what you may, philosophically, I am always working in a space opened up by a triangulation of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. (I have recently agreed to leave my papers to the “Simon Silverman Center for Phenomenology” at Duquesne University. I guess that settles it!) If “anti-” means exceptional, not predicted by the program or the paradigm, I am happy to have the uncloseted Caputo (Catherine Keller) 292

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pronounced queer in the way Cassidy-Deketelaere lays this out here, which I think is insightful, and goes along with the very “improper” things Derrida has to say in Glas which juxtaposes Hegel and, good heavens, Genet! In the second half of Cassidy-Deketelaere’s chapter, he worries that my depiction of the dehumanization of flesh under torture or disease leaves me unable to answer the question what makes this flesh human. He does not hold that I deny that this is human flesh, but claims I cannot account for it, that I have left these suffering bodies isolated, cut off from their surrounding world and context of care. So his question is, in the language of phenomenology, what intentional attitude, what on the “noetic” side of what I am saying, allows us to regard these dehumanized bodies (on the noematic side) as still human, how is that brought into view? My account lacks, he says, an intentionality of care, a hermeneutics of care, so here I will try to explain that and how I account for care. Deketelaere recognizes this intentionality in my account of Antigone and recommends that I should have paid attention to Kant on human dignity. That is an interesting point to make, which I do in passing in Weakness,2 because in my earlier and more Catholic days I was quite interested in Kant and a “phenomenology of the person,” in which I intended—another unfinished project!—to reread Kant’s ethics of the other person as an end in itself in phenomenological terms.3 I think Cassidy-Deketelaere needs to remove the brackets he puts on my interest in theology and religion. Once theology is relieved of its supernaturalism and philosophy of its transcendentalism, the two begin to converge in what I call theopoetics. He says I should focus on human existence, not God, but since I do not think that God exists and that the name of God is the name of a call to which human existence is to be the response, that would be difficult. Some part of our difference here is that he seems to accept Husserl’s argument about “analogical transfer” from the ego to the alter ego in the Fifth Meditation. I do not. I think the other precedes the self, that the self is gradually constituted in response to the look of the (m)other, that the world is already up and running when I arrive, that the constitution of the “I” is the doing of the other in “me,” that the I starts out in the accusative while the nominative is a later accomplishment. I think he is following Husserl’s false lead. So then, what about “care”? What I say about flesh laid low is framed within my account of the bodies in the New Testament, which I had first introduced in an effort to show what had gone wrong with Heidegger, against whose excessive Hellenizing (from the 1930s on) I posed the strikingly different framing of the human condition found in the scriptures. Against Ethics started out as Part Two of a book of which Part One was Demythologizing Heidegger. But the wise editors at Indiana University Press talked me out of that oversized project. The point is that what I say about flesh is

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contextualized within an account of healing, of therapeutics, hence a hermeneutics of care. Contrary to the philosophers, from the Greeks to the phenomenologists, the New Testament presents us with a long line of wounded bodies, of the lame, the blind, the deaf, the hungry, and especially of what is called there the “leper,” who has an iconic role in those texts (it was not exactly a first-century medical diagnosis) just as AIDS did back in the 1990s, when Against Ethics was written (today it can be managed and there are even promising signs of a coming cure), and as “cancer” continues to have today. These bodies are the explicit focus of the ministry of Jesus. As I pointed out in The Weakness of God the announced ministry of Jesus was teaching (didaskon) and preaching (kai kerysoon) the good news and healing (kai therapeuon) the sick. Jesus wants to change people’s heart, transform their mind (metanoein), and at the same time heal their bodies, which reflects the close analogy for the Jews between sin and physical paralysis. Jesus breaks the shackles of sin just as he frees a crippled body, practicing all at once a didactics, kerygmatics, and a therapeutics.4 If there were any “clinics” in ancient Galilee, I think Jesus would have gotten summer job working at one. So everything I say would encourage introducing, as Cassidy-Deketelaere does, the clinical situation; nothing I say would discourage it—this was not a book about AIDS or cancer. That “clinical” concern can also be seen in my retelling of the story of Lazarus, where I invoke the image of the “consoler” in Levinas, whose “caress” does not end or compensate for the pain the other suffers but in that moment relieves the suffering of its solitude; the “physician” is a figure of one with healing power, not (necessarily) with a medical degree, who divides the “tragic solitude” of the suffering by sharing it.5 I go on to imagine Jesus spending the night with Mary and Martha, holding their hand, telling them stories about their lost brother that make them laugh and also weep, getting them through the abyss of that night of loss to the next morning when they will have strength to move on. Deketelaere’s bracketing of the religious dimension re-closets the intentionality he demands of me. My criticism of Heidegger in Demythologizing Heidegger is to say his early hermeneutics of facticity is focused on phronesis and techné, on what he calls Sorge (Augustine’s cura), where being-in-theworld is an active agency, a certain know-how, but it lacks a sensitive enough account of Mitsorge, a hermeneutics of what the New Testament calls kardia, the heart, of mercy and compassion, of responding to and suffering with the suffering other. “There is no room in this ontology of factical life,” I write, “for the pain of the other as exercising a claim over me, as mattering to me, as calling and soliciting me.”6 Kardia is the carnal intentionality, the carnal mode of being-in that is missing from Heidegger and tends to be missed by most philosophers, who think in terms of either theoretical wisdom or practical wisdom, knowing that or knowing how, but not mercy, misericordia.

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Tenderness and hardness of the heart are categories fitted very precisely to a phenomenology of flesh. Rather the way that Sartre said we experience the other not in an active intentional act but a passive one, we feel ourselves being-seen by the other’s look or gaze, say in shame. By contrast, ­Levinas showed—and Levinas was responding to Sartre (on l’enfer, c’est les autres)—we experience the suffering other in being-touched by their suffering, in vulnerability, being put in the accusative, being-called-to-respond to the call that issues from the body of the wounded other, which in being laid low comes to us from on high. Everything here turns on the structure of the call and the response. There is a spectrum of calls and hence of responding, a range of responsibility, beginning with the human body laid low that calls upon us from on high, the issue of the inextinguishable Levinasian “face” that looks back, that accuses and infuriates the Nazi guard who cannot kill this look, who cannot dehumanize their victims to the point of taking away at least this much humanity. What Levinas calls the “impossibility of murder” addresses Cassidy-Deketelaere’s concern about dehumanization. One can only dehumanize a human being; the humanity is inextinguishable, beyond the reach of the torturer or the murderer. The call is also found in the claim of the nonhuman animal which also looks back, the wounded bird, livestock kept in “inhuman” conditions being readied for the slaughter. It is found even in the corpse, say, of an innocent child killed by stray bullet from a crossfire; in magnificent, healthy trees felled and stacked in heap in order to make room for a shopping mall; in magnificent icebergs melting under global warming. There is an endless inventory of such “looks,” human and nonhuman, tout autre est tout autre, all of which put us in the accusative, which would make up an “infinite task,” as Husserl says, of an endless phenomenology. After an otherwise careful analysis, Cassidy-Deketelaere gives me no credit for an analysis that is, let us say, not obscurely hidden in my texts about ethics, flesh, suffering, the body, the call, the other. To suggest that the body laid low in this work is “no longer a person,” that the victims of torture or disease do not “remain people,” are merely “meat,” a “bloody pancake,” is a “queer” thing to say about these texts in a perfectly straight sense. As Elaine Scary shows, and I was back then making extensive use of her book, which by now has become a classic, this is their own testimony, ipsissima verba, what they themselves say, that they have been dehumanized, by which they do not mean that they have undergone an Aristotelian substantial change, but made to feel inhuman, robbed of their dignity and human worth, something only a fellow human being can say or feel. No matter how cruel the disease or the Nazi guard, there is a zone of absolute respect inscribed in the face of the other such that the dignity of the person laid low rises up, comes on high. I take the diminished flesh of the one laid low by suffering or torture to constitute what I call

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in Cross and Cosmos the sphere of “difficult glory,” whose paradigm in Christianity is the tortured body of Jesus on the cross, the glory that accompanies suffering and is embedded in the suffering. I am not saying that the victims of disease or torture are no longer human but that they have been “reduced” to inhuman conditions, treated as if they were meat, no longer human, and these are a series of hos me descriptions. This is descriptive, not normative talk. They testify to their humanity in the privative mode, as the horrible absence of what should be present. We experience their humanity in this inhumanity, it calls to us, unless we are hard of heart, hard of hearing the call. In a hermeneutics of kardia it is always a question of maintaining an open heart, a tender heart that makes itself vulnerable, able to touched, which is what the scriptures call a circumcised heart or circumcised ear, open to the other. Its opposite is the “hard of heart,” the sclerotic heart, which hardens itself to the other, closes its ear to the call of the other. That is also why I link the hermeneutics of the heart, of kardia, to metanoia, which I translated not as “repentance” but as a change of heart, being of a new heart, turning around and opening up a closed heart. This realm of what would be called “intentional” life in phenomenology is missed by Heidegger. Deketelaere needs to reinstate my theopoetics of the heart in my work on religion and theology. He might also profit from a look at the earlier work I did on Kant and a phenomenological ethics in which it is foreshadowed. Radical hermeneutics did not become radical theology by accident.

NOTES 1. Visit https://johndcaputo​.com. 2. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 135. 3. See John D. Caputo, “Metaphysics, Finitude and Kant’s Illusion of Practical Reason,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (1982), 87–94; “Kant’s Ethics in Phenomenological Perspective,” in Kant and Phenomenology, ed. T. Seebohm (Washington: University Press of America, 1984), 129–46; “Prudential Insight and Moral Reasoning,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Society 58 (1984), 50–55; “Morality and the Foundations of a Phenomenological Ethics,” Research in Phenomenology, 15 (1985), 269–78; “The Presence of the Other: A Phenomenology of the Human Person,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 53 (1979), 45–58; “Being and the Mystery of the Person,” in The Universe as Journey: Conversations with W. Norris Clarke, SJ, ed. Gerald McCool, SJ (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 93–113. Most of these have been reprinted in John D. Caputo: Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Vol. 1, 1969-1985: Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism Thinking (John D. Caputo Archives, 2022).

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4. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 129–30. 5. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 249–50. 6. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 72.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caputo, John D. John D. Caputo: Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Vol. 1, 1969-1985: Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism Thinking. John D. Caputo Archives, 2022. Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Caputo, John D. Demythologizing Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Caputo, John D. “Being and the Mystery of the Person.” In The Universe as Journey: Conversations with W. Norris Clarke, SJ, edited by Gerald McCool, SJ, 93–113. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988. Caputo, John D. “Morality and the Foundations of a Phenomenological Ethics.” Research in Phenomenology 15 (1985), 269–78. Caputo, John D. “Kant’s Ethics in Phenomenological Perspective.” In Kant and Phenomenology, edited by T. Seebohm, 129–46. Washington: University Press of America, 1984. Caputo, John D. “Prudential Insight and Moral Reasoning.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Society 58 (1984), 50–55. Caputo, John D. “Metaphysics, Finitude and Kant’s Illusion of Practical Reason.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (1982), 87–94. Caputo, John D. “The Presence of the Other: A Phenomenology of the Human Person.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 53 (1979), 45–58.

Index

absolute, 26, 28, 78, 115, 124, 126n15, 143, 157, 175; Spirit, 30, 245 Adorno, Theodor W., 200, 209 Agamben, Giorgio, 22, 25–26, 123, 135, 161, 169 Altizer, Thomas, 20, 257 animality, 22, 284 anthropocentrism, 178, 193 apophatic, 54, 92, 116–20, 140–43, 194–95; experience, 120; imagination, 136, 150; theology, 114, 133, 208 Augustine, 48, 57–58, 69–70, 150, 170, 212–13, 220, 294

catholic principle, 10, 67, 217, 220–23, 226, 233 charity, 99, 239, 242, 246–47, 254n11 Cohen, Leonard, 150, 199–200, 207 cosmology, 194, 211n43, 224, 235

Badiou, Alain, 23 Barth, Karl, 21–23, 182–83, 188n30, 188n34, 261, 264, 270–72 Belief, 21, 47–49, 52, 69–70, 77, 84, 86n18, 141–51, 172, 175, 219, 225, 234, 265–66, 271–72 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 42, 132, 229n7, 257 Bible. See scripture Blanchot, Maurice, 120 Bultmann, Rudolf, 8–9, 21, 155–59, 161–72, 191, 196, 262–64, 271

Eckhart, 79, 90, 126n15, 132, 181, 195, 218–19, 246, 266–67, 272

Catholicism, 46, 58–59, 68–69, 171, 257

Dalferth, Ingolf, 21, 32n2, 156 Death of God, 22, 41–42, 59, 131–34, 157, 233, 240–42, 246, 251–58 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 58 democracy, 11, 55–56, 69, 134–35, 158–59, 246 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M., 7, 96–97, 100–10

Falque, Emmanuel, 3, 12, 36n76, 284 forgiveness, 109, 135, 149, 156, 161, 249 fundamentalism, 52, 224, 266 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 201–2, 205, 257 gift, 25, 42, 115–17, 156, 191, 248, 263–64 Habermas, Jürgen, 61n32, 132 Hegel, Georg, F. H., 8, 23, 30, 43, 78, 123, 128n43, 159–60, 200–1, 224– 26, 234–35, 251, 293 299

300

Index

hospitality, 1, 144, 149, 156, 159, 161, 207, 246, 261–72 Husserl, Edmund, 87n25, 276, 279, 281, 286–87, 293, 295 idealism, 23, 31, 80 Jesus Christ, 7, 10, 26, 55, 83, 97, 100– 10, 123, 164, 171, 184, 223, 229, 243–44, 247–49, 254n11, 261–65, 268n2, 272 Jewish principle, 10, 70, 217, 220, 233 Judaism, 51, 69, 136, 258 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 43, 80, 251, 259, 286, 293, 296 Kearney, Richard, 36n76, 117, 125–26, 132, 143, 221, 270, 275 Keller, Catherine, 32, 40, 275, 292 kenosis, 7, 23, 113–25, 126n15, 128n43, 131–34, 241–43, 257 khora, 76, 213, 238, 258 Kierkegaard, Soren, 40, 75, 100, 132, 186n30, 200, 225, 229n15, 248, 261 kingdom of God, 24, 28, 105, 109, 123, 134, 136, 156, 184, 194–95, 234, 259, 266 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 20–22, 85, 96, 99–100, 109–10, 118–20, 132–33, 184, 195, 218, 230n18, 243, 246–48, 257–58, 287n12, 292, 294–95 Luther, Martin, 21–22, 35n47, 83, 109– 10, 134–35, 160, 178–79, 129n15, 267, 272 Malabou, Catherine, 30–31, 128n46 Marion, Jean-Luc, 3, 13n12, 20, 116 materialism, 3–4, 20, 22, 31–32, 43, 141 Meillassoux, Quentin, 30, 159–60 messianic, 6, 19, 26–30, 41–42, 78, 83–84, 100–2, 113–14, 123, 127n18, 207, 257–58 metaphysics, 3, 7, 21, 32, 43, 57, 75, 85, 115–18, 125, 172, 183, 185, 224–25, 239–47, 255n31, 258

Metz, Johann Baptist, 26, 223, 251 Milbank, John, 3–4, 30 Moltmann, Jürgen, 191, 223 name of God, 6, 29, 41–42, 50, 58, 69, 109–10, 119, 124, 126n15, 133, 136, 148, 155–58, 170–71, 176, 191–95, 200, 204, 207, 213, 219, 223, 226–27, 248, 253n8, 258, 266, 270–73, 293 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 6, 22, 48, 57–59, 69, 251 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40, 100, 239–44, 249–51, 257 Ontotheology, 2, 115 Plato, 115–21, 136, 238 Protestant principle, 10, 70, 217, 223, 233 radical hermeneutics, 7, 42, 48, 69, 75–78, 83–85, 87n25, 90, 110, 139, 171, 192, 206, 208, 235, 237, 243–46, 296 religion without Religion, 4–10, 27–30, 78, 115, 141–42, 159 religious experience, 36n76, 76 Ricoeur, Paul, 96–97 sacred anarchy, 26–29, 121, 139 scripture, 70, 155, 180, 194, 240, 249, 262–65, 293, 296 Shakespeare, William, 7, 96–100 solidarity, 29–30, 74, 82, 133, 136, 242 theological turn, 20, 31, 36n76, 96, 110 theology: negative. See apophatic, theology; political, 5–6, 19–31, 42, 223–24; as theopoetics, 6–11, 27–32, 40–43, 73–85, 87n25, 90, 136, 184, 194–96, 221–25, 227, 237–44, 250–52, 259, 272, 293, 296; radical. See radical theology, 4–11, 19–30, 34n18, 40, 56–58, 68–69, 78, 84, 90, 139–40, 143–4, 148–50, 159, 171,

Index

177, 182, 191, 195–96, 212, 217–28, 232–35, 292, 296; weak, 5, 10, 19–31, 41, 77–78, 84, 113, 124, 133, 139, 155–58, 168, 171, 179, 185, 191, 213, 220–26, 238 Tillich, Paul, 20, 41, 69–70, 96, 98, 105, 106n5, 106n6, 107n21, 132, 145, 148, 170–71, 188n34, 191, 193–94, 218–20, 233–34, 271–72 Tracy, David, 19, 32n1, 40, 188n34 tsimtsum, 8, 116–24, 126n15, 127n18, 128n52, 136

301

undecidability, 49–52, 57, 114–15, 132–35, 172, 234 Vattimo, Gianni, 10–11, 22–23, 41, 133, 143, 146, 237–48, 253 violence, 49–56, 74–75, 80–84, 104, 159, 177, 239–40, 243–46 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 51, 61, 69 Žižek, Slavoj, 3–4, 11, 12n1, 22, 30, 144

About the Editors and Contributors

ABOUT THE EDITORS Martin Koci is assistant professor at the Institute for Fundamental ­Theology and Dogmatics, KU Linz. This book, however, was conceived and finished during his postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Philosophy at the ­University of Vienna. His research focuses on the so-called theological turns in contemporary continental philosophy and the state of Christianity in a postmodern context. From 2011 to 2016 he studied and then worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU ­Leuven ­(Belgium). He is the author of Thinking Faith after Christianity (2020) and the first editor of Transforming the Theological Turn (2020). Joeri Schrijvers is extraordinary professor of the School of Philosophy at North-West University Potchefstroom. He is the author of Ontotheological Turnings? (2011) and Between Faith and Belief (2016). Dr. Schrijvers has published numerous articles in the field of continental philosophy of religion. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Rick Benjamins wrote a dissertation on Origen of Alexandria (Eingeordnete Freiheit, Brill 1994) and was Church minister from 1994 till 2008. Since then he lectured on dogmatics and liberal theology at the Protestant Theological University Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. From September 2022, he will be full professor of liberal theology at the PThU. Benjamins published several books on liberal theology in Dutch (among them Een en Ander: De traditie van de moderne theologie (2008) and Boven is onder ons: 303

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About the Editors and Contributors

een theologie van God na God (2022) and a number of articles in English. The focus of his research is on the relation between modern liberal and postmodern radical theology. Agata Bielik-Robson is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her publications include The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (2014), and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019). John D. Caputo, the Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus (Syracuse University) and the Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Villanova University), is an American philosophical theologian who works in the area of “weak” or “radical” theology, drawing upon hermeneutic and deconstructive theory. His most recent book, Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination, will appear in October 2022. He is also the author of In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (2020); Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (2019); Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (2018); and a second edition of On Religion (2019). The Essential Caputo (2018) is a collection of his work from the early 1970s to the present time. In his major works he has argued that interpretation goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics, 1987), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 1997), that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, taking a phrase from St. Paul, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, (2006), which won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence in the category of constructive theology, and that God does not exist, God insists (The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps). Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere is a researcher in philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris and the Australian Catholic University. His work at the intersection of phenomenology, theology, and the philosophy of medicine has appeared in Angelaki, Open Theology, and Literature and Theology. He is the (co-)editor of The Pulse of Sense: Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy (2022) and The Emmanuel Falque Reader: Key Writings in Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy of Religion (2023). Marie Chabbert is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s St John’s College. Her research, which is situated at the crossroads between

About the Editors and Contributors

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philosophy, theology, and the anthropology of religion, interrogates how contemporary French thought inaugurates new perspectives for thinking the increased fluidity of faith in the postsecular age, as well as religious identity, belonging, and peaceful pluralism at a time of a violent return of fundamentalism at the forefront of international preoccupations. She recently co-edited a double special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities entitled The Pulse of Sense: Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy. Her first monograph, Faithful Deicide: Contemporary French Thought and the Eternal Return of Religion, is forthcoming. Christophe Chalamet is professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). He previously taught at Fordham University in New York City. Among his publications are A Most Excellent Way: An Essay on Faith, Hope and Love (2020) and (as editor) The Challenge of History: Readings in Modern Theology (2020). Enrieke Damen is a PhD researcher at the Protest Theological University in The Netherlands. She has an interest in continental philosophy of religion, postcolonial theory, and theological ethics, and specializes in radical theology. Her current research focuses on theopoetics in the work of John D. Caputo and Richard Kearney and positions it within postsecular society. Maria Francesca French is a post Christian thinker and writer, and she has spent the tenure of her career in theological education, as both professor and administrator, holding two MAs and a DMin. Maria has also worked in innovative church contexts, church planting, and denominational leadership. She is focused on the intersections of faith and culture, offering new forums for faith engagement and theological imaginations that are viable and sustainable for an uncertain future, exploring the intersections of Radical Theology and post-theism. Find her podcasting on Sacred Anarchies: A Post Church Podcast, curating content and coach on her Patreon, and writing for her column on Patheos. Jan-Olav Henriksen, ThD and PhD, is professor of Philosophy of Religion at (MF) Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society in Oslo since 1994. Recent works of his are Christianity as Distinct Practices—A Complicated Relationship (2020) and Representation and Ultimacy—Christian Religion as Unfinished Business (2020). Erik Meganck studied philosophy, theology, and psychology. He wrote a dissertation on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Vattimo. He taught Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion at Louvain University (Belgium). His award winning Religieus atheïsme. (Post)moderne filosofen over God en

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About the Editors and Contributors

godsdienst (2021) is translated and will be published by SUNY. He recently published “World without End: From Hyperreligious Theism to Religious Atheism” in the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion (2021). George Pattison is retired Anglican priest and theologian who has held positions in Cambridge, Aarhus, Oxford, and Glasgow universities. He has published extensively in the area of philosophical theology with special emphasis on theology and existentialism. His recent work includes the threepart Philosophy of Christian Life (2018, 2020, 2021), and he was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020). Pascale Renaud-Grosbras is a minister of the United Protestant Church of France. After a PhD in English literature and a career as a literary translator, she currently works as a theologian for the Défap, a modern missionary organization based in Paris. Her current area of research is hospitality, seen as a theological concept, and the question of missiology in the contemporary world. Justin Sands is a senior lecturer and deputy head of the Department in theology St. Augustine College of South Africa. He is also a research fellow at the University of the Free State, and an extraordinary researcher at North-West University. Barry Taylor lives in London where he writes and teaches in a variety of settings. He is an associate professor of Radical Theology for GCAS (Global Center for Advanced Studies), a degree granting higher education platform with students from around the globe studying at the intersections of philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis. He also works on projects with his co-writer Maria French, currently on their Sacred Anarchies podcast as well as other consulting and educational ventures. Taylor also speaks at events, festivals, and conferences around the globe. He has published a number of books, most recently The Aesthetics of A/Theism and Sex, God and Rock ‘n’ Roll (2019), a theological memoir of sorts. Calvin D. Ullrich is a research fellow at the Ecumenical Institute of the Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany, and a research associate of the Faculties of Theology at Stellenbosch University and the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the author of Sovereignty and Event: The Political in John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology (2021) for which he was the recipient of the Manfred Lautenschläger Prize (2022). He is currently the principal investigator for a project engaging with phenomenologies of embodiment, affect theory, and Christian anthropology, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.