The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (FUP))
Noëlle Vahanian
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0823256952
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book aims to renew theological thinking by extending and radicalizing an iconoclastic and existentialist mode of thought. It proposes a theology whose point of departure assumes and accepts the critiques of religion launched by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Feuerbach but nevertheless takes theological desire seriously as a rebellious force working within, but against, an anthropomorphic, phallogocentric worldview.
As a theology of language, it does not claim any privileged access to some transcendent divine essence or ground of Being. On the contrary, for Noelle Vahanian theology is a strictly secular discourse, like any other discourse, but aware of its limitations and wary of great promises--its own included. Its faith is that this secular theological desire can be a force against the constitutive indifference of thought, and it is a meditative act of rebellion. Aphoristic instead of argumentative, this book offers an original and constructive engagement with such seminal issues as indifference, belief, madness, and love.
an issue for you? It is clear enough that we do not know, so that what is real is neither the optimistic illusion that the world without is one with the world within nor the pessimistic disillusion that the world without senselessly fetters the world within; what is real is what is indifferent to your mood, which is life. But while this much is clear, why should we cease to be amazed by the pleroma? Why should we cease to be puzzled, dumbfounded, awed, by 42 The Law of the Indifferent Middle
fulfilment for a supreme father figure. Freud speaks of religion as societal mass delusion oiling the process of civilization, but that interpretation, which on a political level cannot be dismissed, entirely dispenses with the personal struggle and paradox that Kierkegaard calls faith, and Erasmus, for the same reason, folly. That is, if civilization can transform misery into ordinary unhappiness, religion as wish fulfilment and mass delusion can assuage the necessary discontents that
emotions that bear witness to the realization of a matter of fact. Here, representation in fact re-presents, makes manifest, makes real the fact that God is dead. If there is any joy that can be born of this death, it is the joy of release, of acknowledgement, of avowal, of speaking and communing through a common language. The two become one and are added by one: the conjunction effects the distanciation of the two from Two Ways to Believe ................. 18505$ $CH5 12-20-13 14:48:43 PS
of linguistic reality by bringing the word God down to the four-legged level of man’s best friend. This is obvious, but by the same token a dog calls us to life’s divine ordinariness. Dogs or cows—we can read Winquist in an early draft of his since published Surface of the Deep: As my thinking matured I began to understand that I had theologically apprenticed myself to a cow. . . . I met my cow at a fork in the road. I had a tendency to textualize experience and then philosophically elaborate the
name of an event, of a hyper-event that is unforeseeable, undeconstructible, and impossible, insofar as it an aporia, has the makings of a Kierkegaardian God, and as such, for Vattimo, amounts to a ghost of the metaphysical worldview—and is this not what seems to bother Keller also? But for Vattimo, the history of the end of metaphysics follows the theological structure of kenosis as exemplified in the Christian weakening of God embodied in Jesus Christ. By Keller’s account, however, one would