Radical theology and looking ahead

I hope to finally finish working through Kearney’s Anatheism by next week, but no promises. School and other obligations have turned out to be way more taxing than I had assumed. In the meantime, interested readers might want to keep an eye on Jeremy’s blog over the next two weeks, as he will be posting in depth on several works of radical theology.

Finally, by way of an announcement, I wanted to make known that this blog will be hosting a book event on Eric Santner’s The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. The event will start on March 22nd and continue for two weeks. In addition to Jeremy and myself, there will be posts from AJ and Robert. I’m looking forward to the collaboration, and hopefully some good dialog. This conversation will be even better if we get some contributions from other readers, so I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book and read along.

A new frontier

H/T: Blake

Grad school premonition?

I’m not normally one to get taken in by fortune cookies, with their vague predictions of happiness, but earlier today I had a rather strange experience. I had been having one of those “I’m sure I will get rejected by all programs” day, but the cafeteria had Chinese food, and thus, fortune cookies. The cookie that I picked had a total of three fortunes in it, which I imagine is a somewhat unique occurrence that still happens sometimes because of the mechanical production of the cookies. Still, I can’t help but think that my set of fortunes are a rare combination, because two of them were connected to each other, meaning two actual pieces of paper got inserted into one cookie.

The three fortunes were:

You will soon receive an offer you cannot refuse.

You will live a long life and eat many fortune cookies.

You will move to a wonderful new home within the year.

Given this, I cannot help but conclude that my earlier pessimism was unfounded; I will get into a great program with a good housing situation in a city that features excellent Chinese cuisine.

Why is it still January?

In honor of Woland

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has quickly become one of my favorite novels. In addition to the incredible Satan character, we have Behemoth the cat, who is definitely the most amusing character I’ve read in Western literature.

Anatheism – Part 2: Bracketing belief, and the transcendence beneath us

Summary: In the second part of the book, Kearney turns first to a group of philosophers and then to a collection of modern novelists in an attempt to sketch out a ’sacramental imagination.’ At the start of chapter 4, Kearney writes that there are three elements of anatheism: protest, prophecy, and sacrament. In showing the challenge to an omnipotent, otherworldy God, Kearney sums up that the first three chapters have focused on protest and prophecy; here, we turn exclusively to sacrament.

If we are following anatheism as an option that opens up a way to the divine beyond the dichotomy of theism and atheism, then this chapter has little in the way of surprising claims. Even his choice of writers in these two chapters bears the sign that he will be further mystifying our neat categories. The possibility for this is contained in a paradox. First, we have the return to a God that is after God (ana-theos). Bound up with this is the idea of a return to the sacred after setting it aside (ana-thema). What the sacramental move shows us is a God set apart from the God of metaphysical sufficiency.

Kearney argues that only Merleau-Ponty (and not, for example, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre, or Stein) that we see a ‘full fledged’ phenomenology of the flesh (pg. 88). What this amounts to, for Kearney, is the putting to rest of the ghost of transcendental idealism; Platonism is reversed and the flesh is the most intimate “element.” Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh surpasses traditional dualisms of mind/body, real/ideal, and subject/object. It is interesting, that, in order to develop this, Merleau-Ponty traces all the way back to the senses and there he finds the act of communion. But what is this sacrament? “Each sensory encounter with the strangeness of the world is an invitation to a “natal pact” where, through sympathy, the human self and the strange world give birth to one another. Sacramental sensation is a reversible rapport between myself and things, wherein the sensible gives birth to itself through me” (pg. 89).

That Merleau-Ponty turns to a kind of secularized communion in order to establish his phenomenological project does not mean that he is a theologian or Christian apologist. Kearney is drawn to Merleau-Ponty because of his phenomenological interpretation of the eucharist, and the fact that he remains agnostic about the truth claims of the method is an advantageous thing. What the method offers is “a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God beyond us” (pg. 91).

Following Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, what Merleau-Ponty warns against is a particular Judeo-Christian ontology which locates the divine as an otherworldy and timeless Being. Positing this God rejects the sanctity of the flesh and necessarily negates the world (ie nihilism). Here Kearney implies that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh can be read in part as an answer to Nietzsche, and further as something much closer to the message of the Incarnation. Philosophically, it seems to me that Merleau-Ponty clears space for the possibility of an anatheist project. I will return to this a bit more in the comments section.

Kearney then turns to Kristeva, who, as a linguist and psychoanalyst, adds other perspectives to the phenomenology of the flesh. Kearney only spends a small amount of time with Kristeva, but her comment in Strangers to Ourselves that we must surmount dualisms such as saved and damned and native and stranger because they lead to war are labeled by Kearney as ‘anatheist questions’ (pg. 96). In the book, Kristeva actually helps transition into the next chapter because of her interest in Proust. What we are offered is a aesthetic of transubstantiation, and it amounts to an “immanent transcendence.” This leans heavily towards a kind of mystical panentheism, where God is in all beings, and Kearney makes this clear in the chapter’s closing.

I will not spend time with the modern novelists (Proust, Joyce, and Woolf), in part because I am even less familiar with their work than I am with Merleau-Ponty’s or Kristeva’s. However, the basic point is that these authors take a free poetic license to suspend doctrine and thereby offer variations of the theme of word-made-flesh and flesh-made-word. [There are obviously many other important points, especially, in my view, from Proust (and thereby Kristeva), but for the sake of conciseness, I'm moving quickly].

One of the best sections of the book is the final part of chapter 5, “Textual Traversals.” For Kearney, the point of anatheist aesthetics is the possibility of the sacred and secular conjugating and crossing. This is why he does not take up confessional writers in the chapter (all three writers are agnostics or atheists), although confessional writers are definitely not excluded from this kind of an aesthetic.

Also in this section, Kearney finally gives a more specific claim about anatheism, stating that he wants to affirm the positive aspect of the prefix ana- as retrieving what was lost in a new way. Thus, “I have no wish to endorse an empty secularism that merely aestheticizes religion by removing its faith content” (pg. 130). Suspending belief as readers of fiction, we may afterwards return to faith in God if we so choose. As such, anatheism is more about retrieving the sacred in the secular than taking the sacred out of the secular.

Comments/critique: In returning to this chapter, especially after not looking at it for several weeks, I was reminded of some frustrating passages as well as some very lucid ones. I am coming to realize that part of the reason that certain aspects of the book frustrate me is that Kearney is already doing a lot of summary, so attempting to summarize his summaries for the blog seems like a fruitless task. I hope this isn’t read as a diss on the book, because what I am learning that it really gets at is that the book is exceptionally well-written, even for those with little background in writers such as Merleau-Ponty or Kristeva. As such, don’t be put off if my summaries are becoming more choppy and stale – you should read the book for yourself.

However, there are times where I find myself thinking that certain parts could be explored more. While writing this up, it struck me that, philosophically, Merleau-Ponty is who seems to do most of the heavy lifting for Kearney. Although it might buck against the more interdisciplinary style of works like this, I’m thinking that it would be beneficial to see a book-length work on Merleau-Ponty. In particular, I’m not sure about the claim that the phenomenology of the flesh can go beyond the dualisms of mind/body and so on. Perhaps it is reverse Platonism, but then aren’t we left with materialism? The more I read, the more I am left unconvinced with appeals to post-metaphysical thought, or, more pointedly, the possibility of such a thing. I’m already thinking that this will lead me to a more sustained reading of more recent continental thinkers.

Having said that, I think that Kearney is pretty clear in these chapters about his aims. He alludes to this a couple of times, but I’m becoming convinced that this book can be read as a roadmap for Ricoeur’s notion of the second naivete that comes after the abandonment of the first naivete. Thus we see the necessity to traverse atheism (for Ricoeur this was through Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) as well as a positive return to a different kind of faith. But what I want to press here is whether we are not at least caught in some kind of particularity. Although we end up a lot different from what might be called classical orthodoxy, aren’t we basically reliant on the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in the Christian concept of kenosis? I know that there a similarities in Buddhism, for instance, but I’m thinking that the ideas of “transcendent immanence,” “aesthetics of transubstantiation,” and “sacramental imagination” are bound up with a distinctly Christian logic. Perhaps this is something that Kearney will return to in the forthcoming companion books on non-Western religions, but I’m not sure what would change. To be sure, we are definitely left with much different conceptions of sacred and secular and so on, but at root we have to traverse through the Christian tradition to get there.

Reading/grad school update

In the interests of accountability, I’m going to try to recall my reading habits and accomplishes from the break, now that I’m at the end of the first week of classes. I will compare this to the plans I made back in December.

First, a quick update on grad school, since I’ve just returned from the post office where I sent off the final remaining materials. In total, I have applied to 9 schools, 6 of which are for the PhD versus 3 for a terminal MA. A few of the PhD places have options to be considered for both degrees (ie, if you aren’t good enough to be offered a PhD position, you can be admitted to the MA program with little to no funding). I consider these options as the ultimate fall-back, although the lack of funding will force me to pause and consider some other options. What I’m really not looking forward to is the possibility of total rejection, largely because I’d either have to do this entire, nerve-wracking process over again in 9 months, or else give up on academia altogether. I’m optimistic that I will have at least some kind of offer, and I’ll cross these what-if bridges when I come to them.

The 6 “PhD” schools are, in no specific order, Duquesne, Fordham, Boston College, Purdue, Vanderbilt, and Villanova. To be honest, I’d be really excited to study under the faculty of any of these schools, although the interests represented at each of them are not homogenous. If I’m lucky enough to be admitted into multiple schools, this will become a more intense consideration, although I have some idea of places that are a closer fit. The MA-only places are Southern Illinois Carbondale, Loyola Marymount, and Miami University. Each of these schools has the (somewhat rare) opportunity to give some aid for Master’s students, and all three places have multiple faculty who work in and are friendly to Continental philosophy.

My immediate thought after finalizing the list is that I wish I had given myself another option or two for the MA-level, although I do think I have a pretty good chance to be admitted into one or two of those places. The major problem is that there don’t seem to be a ton of quality MA-level programs that are friendly to Continental philosophy. There are a few that are highly-rated and have good aid, etc., but they do not seem to be open to Continental philosophy, and battling it out for two years seems to be a move of intellectual suicide. There are a couple more programs that I could have applied to, but wasn’t quite sure what the situation was based on course-lists and so on. Another immediate thought I had was regret over not applying to Duke, but it became too late to do much about it, and especially too late to apply to the Religion dept. outside of the Divinity School. As it stands, all of the programs are in philosophy, and I’m figuring that if I go to an MA-program first, it will be easier to transition back towards interdisciplinary theology/philosophy rather than the opposite way.

As far as break reading goes, even though I watched an entire season of Mad Men among other things, I think it went pretty well. Looking back on my list, however, that’s not exactly the case: I only read 4/10 of the books I planned to. But I read more than 4 books. What happened was that I became interested in some other books, and ended up reading those instead of the books I planned to. What this teaches me is to try to plan for this and make smaller lists knowing that this will happen anyways. From the list, I read Theology of Money, Anatheism, The Time That Remains, and The Manual of Detection. I became pretty interested in Agamben, so I decided to just go ahead and read Homo Sacer before attempting the Durantaye book. In addition, I read George Pattison’s good introduction to Kierkegaard (the best one I’ve read for those already-introduced), most of Nicholas Royle’s book on Derrida, and Michel Henry’s book I Am The Truth.

This last book has been fascinating, and I’m eager to read more Henry. I’m still finishing I Am The Truth, but plan to move on to Material Phenomenology, which I think might be a better introduction. Still, Henry has been one of those thinkers who is an experience to read, and giving the small-but-growing interest in Henry, I’m eager to become competent in the current conversation and start contributing to it. Part of this challenge dovetails nicely with my goal of gaining reading competence in French this spring, since some of Henry’s work is still untranslated.

The first week of class has been way busier than I expected, but once the routine sets in, I trust things will calm down a bit. For now, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what book I will use for a major paper in literary theory. I’m leaning towards Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, but open to suggestions of any sort. I’m excited that in addition to the typical theory you’d expect – Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, etc – we’ll also be reading Lacan and Zizek, which is a big surprise consider that I didn’t think anyone at my school even knew who Zizek was. In addition to the literary theory stuff, I will be trying to focus on French, and reading Kierkegaard and Henry, hopefully with the goal of putting together something to research over the summer.

The Haiti situation

I don’t have words. I can’t stomach talking about the reaction from various Antichrist places, such as the TBN. This is simply a link post to pass along a good historical perspective from Peter Hallward, as well as a link to a charity that Hallward commends as having very little overhead.

Peter Hallward, “Our Role in Haiti’s Plight.”

Partners in Health

McCarraher on the 2000s, among other things

I had intended to put together the summary/response to part two of Anatheism tonight, but didn’t make the time. Instead, I happened upon this Eugene McCarraher interview that touches on several of the themes that the Davis and Haley essay gets at, especially regarding the intellectual and moral poverty of the evangelical Right as well as the impotent complicity of the Democratic party. There is a very small part of me that has pragmatist tendencies, and so I recognize that it’s better to go with the somewhat more appealing party, but McCarraher’s analysis, especially of president Obama, strikes me as dead on. The news is depressing, perhaps, but I think it goes to the basic point that we need an option that can break with the current structure, which always moves to subsume any nominal challenges into its mainstream.

Here’s is one of many probing quotes by McCarraher:

That hope is fading, and that’s the third development that characterized the past decade for me: the erosion or atrophy of the conviction that something beyond capitalism is possible. I see it in my brightest students, so many of whom supported Obama and are now wondering how they could have been taken for a ride. I try to tell them, as gently as I can, that they fooled themselves—you saw in Obama what you wanted to see, not what was (often plainly) there. One big reason they fell for Obama is that they have little or nothing in the way of an alternative political imagination; they have only the blurriest of visions in terms of which Obama can be assessed and found very, very wanting. I think credulity about Obama is traceable, in part, to this impoverishment of political vision. The passionate conviction that the world can be otherwise is a kind of love, and love enables you to see things as they are—in other words, it enables you to see the truth, and not fall for lies. It used to be said of youth that they demand too much, that they want the world to change too quickly. I think we’re in a very different moment now, when one of the saddest problems of this generation is that they don’t demand enough; they’re unwilling or unable to imagine and demand a different kind of world. At Villanova, where I teach, the business school attracts the largest number of majors—a not unusual situation in American higher education, which has pretty much become the vo-tech school for post-Fordist capitalism.

It’s better to get the quote in context, because it’s really hard to pick just one quotable section. The best news is that it’s only part 1 of 3. Also, it should please readers to know that McCarraher also touches on the (in)famous third-way talk.

H/T Halden.

American evangelicalism and politics

Both A.J. and Jeremy have written a few recent posts on the topic of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. In the various discussions, one point that has been raised (by me) is the ambiguity between the terms, and to what extent it’s fair to say that all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Further, one question that I had not voiced was to what extent labeling someone a fundamentalist is a move to simply silence them. While I don’t want to grant much validity to what comes out of many fundamentalist persons that I’ve seen/interacted with, I do think that the question of a power-move to silence-and-dismiss is worth pondering. Having said that, I don’t think that that’s what either Jeremy or A.J. is up to with their posts.

It might be because of my own position as a former insider to both the evangelical and fundamentalist camps, but I’m not sure that we’ll ever be able to get an unequivocal definition of either term. However, I’m not sure whether that’s really important, and at the risk of some hypostasizing, I’d like to alter the wind of the discussion towards political action and the potential for tangible, systemic change. I think that, for whatever kind of labels we are going to toss around, there has been a coalescing of conservative Christians over the past 40-50 years in America. I want to suggest that this movement is more powerful and more important than the particulars of theology. Granting that there are some differences between the two (ie, there are definitely evangelicals that are not reactionary/fundamentalist), what I’m suggesting is that these differences may work out to be more in degree than in kind.

Naming the political and cultural effects of this movement is one of the central aims of the excellent book The Sleeping Giant Has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the United States, edited by Jeffrey Robbins and Neal Magee. I found my copy of this book last night when I was doing some cleaning before the start of another new semester. I haven’t read all of the essays in the book, but those I’ve read have been insightful, and the book should be quite affordable used. Anyways, one of the most pointed essays in line with what I have been talking about is “The Cultural Logic of Evangelical Christianity” by Creston Davis and Christopher Haley.

Davis and Haley waste little words in getting to the point: both Evangelical Christianity and its self-invented Other, multiculturalism (i.e. American liberal pluralism) serve as distractions from the real; neither even account for the effects of late capitalism and the neoliberal revolution. Essentially, both offer millions a busy consumers an ideology that requires no thought, and thus is complicit with the neoliberal status quo. Instead of summarizing the entire essay, here are some especially good quotes:

In its latest manifestation, the rise of the evangelical Right in contemporary U.S. politics is described frequently as a backlash against the 1960s and its profound social and cultural changes. In actuality, the “1960s” has become the metaphor for a range of social movements that emerged in the period between the late 1950s (exemplified by the liberal Warren Supreme Court) and Ronald Reagan’s presidential election in 1981 (which was ironic in that it ousted a professed evangelical, Jimmy Carter, though Reagan was neither an evangelical nor a practicing Christian). These movements opened the possibility of new lifestyles and personal practices, critiqued American foreign and domestic policies, and examined the ways received categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality privilege certain individuals and groups while marginalizing others. These movements included civil rights, peace, feminism, gay and lesbian activism, environmentalism, anticapitalism, anti-imperialism/war, antisexism, and antiracism.

Davis and Haley, “The Cultural Logic …” New York: Continuum, 2008. pg. 69

Our use of the term “neoliberalism” to indicate the dominant logic of our age is a choice from several other related terms (“neoclassical economics,” “globalization,” “multinational capitalism”) frequently used to describe the same phenomenon. We find “neoliberalism” to be the most comprehensive term because in each case the other terms capture only certain aspects of the total socioeconomic revolution under way. … “Neoliberalism” has the benefit of capturing both the political and economic components of this global revolution while assuming neoclassical economic theory and presupposing both multinational capitalism and the determinations behind the elimination of spatial and temporal barriers that have brought about globalization.

Davis and Haly, pg. 71-72

…deep within the ideological structure of the evangelical worldview, free-market capitalism must be a part of God’s plan and cannot conflict with biblical teachings. In addition, what appears at the surface as the recent syncretism of evangelical doctrine and free-market ideology (now manifesting itself in a multination phase), is in fact a long-standing relationship of ideological support. This is the great irony of the evangelical Right that Slavoj Zizek puts forth in this book’s postface: “What moral conservatives fail to perceive is thus how, to put it in Hegelese, in fighting the dissolute liberal permissive culture, they are fighting the necessary ideological consequences of the unbridled economy that they themselves fully and passionately support: their struggle against the external enemy is the struggle against the obverse of their own position.”

Davis and Haley, pg. 73-74

The utopian ideal behind multiculturalism is simple: by leveling cultural differences on an equal playing field, society would be more tolerant and just in terms of access to political and economic resources – which is just what multiculturalism is all about: the distribution of power. Multiculturalism as a sociopolitical goal is in direct contrast to the melting-pot ideal… There is a deeper level, however, that exposes its surface truth: the inclusive logic of multiculturalism masks a power game that maintains a bourgeois, capitalist status quo.

Davis and Haley, pg. 78-79

To put it bluntly, the social and political judgment of both evangelicalism and multiculturalism must be that they are equally abject failures. Possibly worse than this, I think, is the fact that they serve as a nice, bitter bifurcation of the contemporary political landscape that isn’t helpful in regards to thinking towards alternatives. For our recent bashing of “third way” talk, it must be said that both of these options are pretty horrible, and thus we must invite a “third way forward,” although of course we could probably do well with a fourth and fifth way as well.

Roland Boer has recent made a few posts regarding more of an alliance of sorts between the religious and political Left. Towards the end of the essay, Davis and Haley allude to a materialist politics that involves mutual responsibilities in a shared community, including, ultimately, “political control of necessities of well-being mediated by an economy” (pg. 80). While I think that materialism is most likely the best common political ground for the religious and political Left, I’m not very confident that the evangelical machine is penetrable. I think what we need to see is voices within the mainstream evangelical community voice the systemic closeness of biblical justice and socialism/communism, because as metanarratives, they are much closer to each other than either is to neoliberalism. Unfortunately, it seems too pollyanna to expect such a movement to occur.

Anatheism – Part 1: Seeing and responding to the strange

Summary: As we’ve discussed in the introduction, Kearney’s concern with anatheism seems to be the opening of a liminal space as a kind of portal to experience the divine. Accordingly, Kearney opens the first chapter of part 1, “In the Moment,” with a consideration of encounters with a divine stranger. In this chapter, he uses the Abrahamic religions as examples, citing the story of Abraham and three angels in Genesis 18 (Judaism), Mary’s encounter with the Angel (Christianity), and Muhammad’s message from God in the cave (Islam). For the sake of summary and to move on to themes, I’m not really going to explore Kearney’s details too much in the summaries.

The stories speak to a wager between compassion and hostility. Kearney says that monotheism is the history of this wager (pg. 22), and further, that the Bible can be read as a series of stories that struggle to respond to the alien. Here he cites Levinas that the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. Kearney: “The message is this: the divine, as exile, is in each human other who asks to be received in our midst. The face that serves as trace of transcendent divinity is also a portal to humanity in its flesh and blood immanence” (pg. 20).

Kearney makes the interesting point that the Hebrew Bible contains thirty-six commands to “love the stranger” and only two to “love your neighbor.” Citing several of these passages in Deuteronomy (10:18, 27:19, 24:17, 16:11), he pulls out three common themes related to the command to love the stranger. First, the stranger is associated with the name of God. Second is the close link between the stranger and the orphan or widow, ie the powerless, defenseless, without family. And third is that the commandments to love the stranger speak to a wide concept of justice; Kearney, polemically, notes that this justice goes way beyond homeland security.

The warnings to love the stranger suggest that our response to the irreducibly Other is fear, and that hospitality does not come naturally. The history of all three monotheistic religions (and even many passages in the Bible) shows us that each one can be guilty of hostility to the Other. Kearney makes no bones about this in the book, and it seems that part of the anatheistic wager is that it embraces this ambiguity and ambivalence. Western religion can be seen as the history of the either/or. Citing the linguist Emile Benveniste, Kearney argues that there is an inaugural ambivalence towards the strange; our words hostile and hospitality have a common root.

For Kearney, religion tells the “double story” of violence or compassion, genocide or justice, thanatos or eros. Often the double story happens at the same time. The challenge is to wrestle with both angels of dark and angels of light, and this double story is why Kearney admits that we must engage with critical and iconoclastic atheism. Although he doesn’t name names, here I take him to be referring to the “new atheists,” who are helpful insofar as they reveal the murderous potential of religion. The importance of the fact that these persons are also strangers is not lost on Kearney, and it is true that some responses to the new atheists have simply been dismissive. This says nothing, of course, of the content or quality of specific new atheist polemics, but Kearney shows a much different response than others.

This point aside, I don’t think Kearney is arguing for much more of a substantive engagement with the so-called new atheists. However, he is much more receptive of “open atheism” or what he calls a-theism, and even argues that it is essential to the anatheist wager. A-theism is a departure from God that struggles with God, and thereby leaves open the possibility of a return to God. As such, anatheism is impossible without a-theism, or the traversal through the dark of not-knowing.

Turning to the next chapter, we see five components that make up the anatheist wager. These are not to be understood as chronological or in some kind of pattern, because a wager occurs in an instant, although it is complex and has more that precedes and more that follows it. The five parts of this hermeneutic arc are imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality. I will briefly try to spell out the importance of these five moves:

imagination – Imagination might be the inaugural move of anatheism, because it enables us to hear the call of the divine, or, in other words, to open our eyes and ears to the Stranger who comes. Imagination gives the freedom to be able to choose, which is necessary for any wager.

humor – Kearney does not comment much on humor, except to say that it is the ability to “encounter and compose opposites” or to see possible and impossible at the exact same time. Interestingly, he makes a connection with messianic time, arguing that messianic time is divinely comic in its disruption of history by turning past and future on their heads.

commitment – This part of the wager makes truth primarily a matter of existential transformation. “If God had truth in his right hand, as Lessing notes, and the striving for truth in the left, we should choose the left. In the anatheist wager, truth becomes possible as betrothal.” (pg. 44)

discernment – This is a key one, because until now there has been little that is critical of the Other. Not every stranger is welcoming, and its naive to assume that we can be unconditional towards every other who approaches. Further, there are countless examples in the modern imagination of those who claim to listen to some Other and thereby justify the awful things that they have done.

hopitality – Just to say, love – understood through compassion and justice – is what serves as the watermark of anatheism. Kearney advocates oneself as another, the “self [becoming] Other to itself as it encounters Others besides itself.” Otherwise selfhood is “brute repetition.” (pg. 48)

The theme of hospitality leads Kearney into a discussion of interreligious and interconfession dialog. His conclusion of sorts that we must reinterpret the “oldest cries of the religious heart in both our sacred and secular worlds” leads him to reject what some might see as classical theism. I’m not sure Kearney would go that far, but it isn’t clear in the text. He argues that a prerequisite of being radically attentive to these religious cries is that we abandon the “Master God” of sovereignty and theodicy.

Unfortunately, Kearney does not expound too much on conceptions of God, but he does clearly embrace the Incarnation as kenosis, and argues that anatheism opens up this alternative to theistic sovereignty:

The messianic way leads from Sovereign Self to excluded stranger, breaching the highest in the name of the lowest, the first in the name of the last. Which is why I keep insisting that interconfessional hospitality toward other faiths is not just an option for Christians but an imperative. Christian caritas, as a refusal of exclusivist power, is a summons to endless kenosis (pg. 55).

In the third and final chapter of part 1, “In the Name,” Kearney turns to the question of what we mean when we speak the name of God, and sets this in the context of the present day (the subtitle is “After Auschwitz Who Can Say God?”). Kearney deals briefly with several Jewish thinkers, including Etty Hillesum, Arendt, Irving Greenberg, Levinas, and Derrida (who he is pretty critical of, here and elsewhere) before turning to Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur, both of whom he explores at length. Each of these people has something to contribute towards answering how to say God after Auschwitz, and this I remember this chapter being very interesting, but my notes are really lacking (maybe because the chapter was so interesting). Still, I think that the heart of what Kearney gets at – and a central meditation of the anatheist wager – is encapsulated in this quote: “The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come into existence but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence” (pg. 61).

Comments/critique: I would like to see Kearney go into more details in some areas, such as when he is talking about theism. At one point, he does say that anatheism can be near antitheism nor antiatheism, which might clear up a little bit of confusion, but it seems that anatheism opens up the space for some kind of return to theism. Unfortunately, we never really seem to get more details about what that is. This is possibly an intentional move, and I do appreciate Kearney’s general posture of ambivalence towards theism in the book. I’m still trying to discern who the audience of this book is.

The reason that I say this is because there are quite a few parts in the opening chapters where he refers to various philosophers in an off-handed way. For some people who I am not familiar with at all, such as Merleau-Ponty, this was a bit frustrating, because I’d have like to looked at a citation and had it for future reference. In a way, the endnotes are fairly brief, but there are some topics that he deals with in extensive, multiple-page endnotes. Some of this could be a stylistic thing, and I think it decreases a lot in the second and third parts of the book, and if it didn’t I would probably say that it took a lot away from an otherwise excellent book. As it stands, it’s a bit frustrating, especially in returning to some chapters, but I don’t think it’s a major problem.

Finally, I would like to see more about dogma. His comments towards dogma are especially ambiguous. He is pretty much flatly against it when it is in service of the so-called Master God, but at another point, he holds open the possibility of some kind of dogma. I think a really detailed account is probably way outside the scope of the book, and perhaps the fact that this is one area I keep returning to when thinking about the book just means that I ned to do some more reading for myself.