Clayton Crockett

Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology

Abstract This article develops a theoretical and political critique of the contemporary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity, primarily in the later work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity derived from Heidegger and Benjamin, and we challenge this privileging of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. Messianism is contrasted with plasticity, and plasticity is shown to have resources to overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to open a creative and productive political space for a radical theological and philosophical reflection.

Technology and the Time-Image: Deleuze and Postmodern Subjectivity

Abstract This article develops an argument about the time-image in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and relates it to a broader Continental philosophy of technology and culture, including Kant, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Antonio Negri. After grounding a consideration of Deleuze in relation to Heidegger’s thesis concerning technology, a constructive interpretation of the time-image is developed in the context of Deleuze’s work. The time-image is related to Deleuze’s early work on Kant’s philosophy and his book Dfference and Repetition, as well as to his important books on cinema, in which the time-image is opposed to the movement-image. The time-image is seen to make up the heart of subjectivity, because it concerns not only external technologies, but also how the self relates to itself internally. This understanding of the time-image is then contrasted with the work of Baudrillard and Virilio. Finally, the contrast between the time-image and the movement-image is shown to possess political implications, partly with the help of Negri.

The Challenge of Postmodernism and the Health of Theology

This article addresses the situation of contemporary theological thinking in relation to postmodernism, or contemporary Continental philosophy. Using a criterion of health from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it argues that theology should avoid either simpleminded assimilation of postmodernism or closeminded rejection. After critically surveying some current theological movements and figures, such as Radical Orthodoxy, I turn away from a paradigm of theology based on Barth to one based on Paul Tillich. Finally, an alternative notion of health is elaborated which leads to a deep and transformative encounter between postmodernism and theology.

The New Communism: Reflections at the End of Capitalism and the Need for Engaging Minor Sciences

Along with Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri, for Vattimo and Zabala the idea of communism, after being pulverized, exorcised, and largely forgotten in the wake of the Cold War, is having a come-back. Of course at the popular level of American political discourse, the word socialism is a curse-word, and communism cannot even be invoked in any serious way. So communism remains marginalized and relegated to European and American academic Leftists, but Vattimo and Zabala raise the question anew in extraordinarily fresh, important and original theoretical terms. This chapter engages with and expands upon Vattimo and Zabala’s analysis to consider the stakes of their intervention as well as reflect on the “return of the Real” in terms of an ecology that would constitute an absolute limit for capitalist growth. If capitalist growth is unsustainable in absolute terms, because it is based on indefinite increase of products, production and profits, then it can only survive in relative terms, by allocating more and more resources to fewer and fewer people and corporations and impoverishing more and more people. Put simply, capitalism has metastatized, and it will kill us if we do not develop and implement an alternative. And any alternative to capitalism would have to be broadly communistic, in Vattimo and Zabala’s terms.

In the Colony with Joy Division

One of the noteworthy things that Joy Division’s music does is to powerfully resist any transformation into a more positive context. These are not feel-good songs. Their lyrics are relentlessly negative, and culminated in the suicide of the troubled singer, Ian Curtis, on May 18, 1980. The apocryphal slogan “Ian Curtis died for your sins” testifies to the religious significance his music and death possessed for some fans. Curtis hanged himself just before the release of Joy Division’s last album, Closer, and an impending tour of the United States. He was an epileptic, his epilepsy was intensifying, and his marriage was also falling apart. Curtis’s life is seen to imitate his art, where his desperate suicide enacts a disturbing sacrifice that fulfills the prophecy of his deeply pessimistic lyrics.

Conclusion: The Event

The New Materialism is a radical theological sketch for a potential postcapitalist world. We need to learn how to think and how to live, and this is what theology is truly about, when it stops being a conservative investment in the status quo or nostalgia for another world in the past or future. To learn means always to relearn, to learn again and again. It is a repetition, but not a repetition of the same or the identical. It is what Deleuze calls a repetition of difference. And it is what we are calling here an event.1

Being (a Brain)

In Book Two of his Metaphysics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle asks the question of being. His task is to “study the things that are, qua being.”1 Being refers fundamentally to substance, but there are multiple substances and “many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be.’”2 Aristotle affirms that being exists as a multiplicity or a plurality, rather than a simple unity. All humans by nature desire to know being, or what is, but the answer is not easy or simple or self-evident. In this chapter, we will affirm that being is energy transformation, which is the conclusion of the previous chapters. At the same time, we will suggest that being as energy is also becoming a brain, which means not just a physiological brain but the possibility of complexity, a fold of being that takes the form of what Gilles Deleuze calls a time-image.

The Political and The Infinite

What are the theoretical and political stakes of a rethinking of religion today? This question has brought together some of the most creative and important theorists working along the edges of the religious and the political in order to generate new forms of thought. Their thinking is largely oriented around the future, even as many of the modern determinations of religion and politics remain decisive for us today and liable to a dramatic rethinking that remains all the more important as it marks a certain threshold of capitalism, democracy and religion. In several respects, one of the classic Enlightenment figures whose work is paradigmatic for these intertwined legacies is John Locke. In the place of a more explicit introduction to these questions, which will be touched upon briefly at the end of this essay, we submit this thesis: Locke attempts to draw a line of demarcation between religion and civil society, and this line, as well as the respective rights of the parties involved, is violated from the moment that it is laid down. Moreover, the very separation of religion and civil society opens up a space of and for capitalism. At the beginning of his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, for example, Locke defines the heart of Christianity as an individual’s ability to tolerate others. Religion, he claims, ‘‘is not made for outward pomp, nor for ecclesiastical dominion, let alone for force; but for regulating men’s lives in accordance with virtue and piety.’’ Rather than these things, being a Christian for Locke becomes one’s individual ability to control one’s own ‘‘lusts and vices.’’ The believer must be holy, non-offensive in manner, and above all unquestionably meek and mild. Locke’s religion, in other words, fits integrally with the tone one finds in a standard modern hymnody that reflects true ideological piety, like ‘‘Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild.’’ The piety one achieves here serves to preclude the desires of faith from penetrating and breaking into the material world. The religious person, according to Locke, should enact her own religion so long as it does not go beyond her individual conscience. In a sense, for Locke, religion’s force is relegated to the immaterial and spiritual realm of life, and if it passes over from the spiritual to the material world then religion EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION