SubStance

Religious discourse now permeates the theoretical humanities. At least since Jacques Derrida's insistence upon complex connections between deconstruction and negative theology,¹ there has been an onslaught of writing connecting the demise of traditional metaphysics to the apotheosis of modernity, and a general despair over the possibility of any purely "secular" form of critical reason. A new postmodernism in philosophy now seeks to move beyond merely immanent critique, toward the construction of alternative and experimental syntheses of knowledge and belief. Thus figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Caputo, De Vries, Eagleton, Taylor, Vattimo, and Zizek, among others, have put religious concepts at the center of both analysis and methodology in contemporary critical theory.² Conversely, contemporary theology (especially the so-called radical orthodoxy movement) has found an engagement with theory to be crucial to its own ends in a post-metaphysical era.³

Meanwhile in politics, the perceived failure (exacerbated since 9/11) of secularization and liberal norms to bring genuine progress and peace has made a violent return to the shelter of dogmatic religious certainty an attractive option for those seeking refuge from an increasingly dehumanized globalization guided by a winner-takes-all neoliberalism that unites the world's peoples only in enslavement to the economically entitled. But the compelling nature of religious conceptions of struggles against state and corporate power do not end or begin with fundamentalist believers. Even an atheist thinker like Alain Badiou has gone so far as to champion Saint Paul's vehement Christian faith as a model for militant resistance to the present world order.⁴ Badiou claims that only something like Paul's insistence that the community of believers are those separated out from every "positive" or constituted cultural identity has the power to model a humanity that can rise above the morass of confused desire upon which capital and state power play. Badiou summarizes the ideology of capitalism in the axiom that "there are only bodies and languages." To this "democratic materialism," which relativizes and thus belittles the significance of all events, Badiou insists we must add the exception, "there are also truths."⁵ The militant church (or Maoist militant) belongs to no particular culture, "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free" (Galatians 3:28). Badiou's insistence on a kind of religious interpellation after the [End Page 3] model of the founding of the Christian community is thus the logic of a militant and revolutionary "indifference" to every positive, embodied cultural difference.

Peter Hallward, among others, has followed Badiou in arguing against the mainstream of leftist political theory since the mid 1980s, which has sought to uphold fidelity to the sub-altern and "other" as the major strategy for "resistance" to oppression (a strategy perhaps most eloquently realized in a theorist such as Butler or Benhabib).⁶ Badiou and Hallward (and in his own way, Zizek) have all used an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze as a foil for the development of their own individual projects.⁷ For these thinkers, Deleuze's affirmation of life as fundamentally creative is the perfect accomplice to a capitalist status quo whose only injunction to us is to enjoy our difference enough for it to become a market. Deleuze's axiom that creativity is at the core of being and knowing is furthermore accused of encouraging a mystical, otherworldly, and fundamentally escapist delirium--one that fails to account for the particular urgency of concrete political decisions and in fact encourages a detached, elitist, and aristocratic disdain for mundane conflicts. And since Deleuze's metaphysics is one that affirms the deeply creative nature of life, and puts forward complicity with that proliferation as our supreme ethical norm, it might seem that we have here a perfect alibi for growth capitalism.⁸

According to Badiou and Hallward, in particular, the ultimate downfall of Deleuze's thought lies in its allegiance to a vitalist mysticism that envisions natural reality as a kind of atheological theophany: the events and characters and artifacts of this world, and all its struggles, being simply avatars of a more fundamental dynamics--dynamics that are never fully of this world...