The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language

Introduction

This work will undoubtedly attract criticism for its failure to abide by the common standards of academic scholarship. Likely, the reader will find no new ideas in it. Possibly, also, she will have no idea what she read about. But, to anyone who ventures to read beyond these words, I extend an invitation to travel a meandering path with stubborn, rebellious, generous love; only such has the power to command divine ordinariness. Far from offering a systematic program for a secular theology of language, this work nevertheless proposes a way to encounter the infinity of the finite—that is, this work is, or claims to be, theological. And if the monk’s contemplative meditation brings him to silence in awe and reverence, here, the task for a theology of language is to find the way of speech into an ordinary world.

By way of introduction, one must make clear that a secular theology of language is a theology of and after the Death of God and the postmodern linguistic turn. In this sense, this theology does not lie squarely with the so-called return to religion symptomatic of recent phenomenology, for instance. It is a theology of the Death of God in that, most basically, it is a theology without a supreme being and all his absolutes. It is a theology of the postmodern linguistic turn in that it belongs to a constructed reality, it is of that order and it makes no claims to transcend this reality. But, this theology is also after the Death of God, because it does not deny God even in being secular.¹

How so? First, one must admit that religion is alive and well across the globe, even in industrialized and post-industrialized countries. But this is not the main sense in which a secular theology of language does not deny God, because such a theology is destined for those who cannot believe in a metaphysical supreme being, those for whom life is quite finite, the soul is a poetic euphemism for the discriminate life that animates a mortal human being, knowledge is a human invention, and truth nothing but a set of conventions. In short, this God that is not being denied has here no ontological weight and worth. But God is nevertheless a word; in fact, God is all the more the Word for lacking any ontological dimension: there is no referent. God as Being is bankrupt for this theology. Yet, God as the Word, is like all words, a fetishized commodity with tremendous power.

In this work, for a secular theology of language, God as precisely the Word marks the genesis of linguistic reality, entry into speech. The Word made flesh is the incarnation of language and speech, of a social order conceived and conveyed linguistically, embodied in our social practices, all the way down to the social practice of the self. There is no string master pulling the strings: we, in a universal sense, orchestrate and colonize our own Lebenswelt. I might have simply spoken of language or the ability to speak, which used to be, along with standing on two legs, one of those markers of the human. But with the word God, I wish to convey—not something that transcends the human—instead, something that puts the human in question. I also want to underscore that language blurs the line between nature and culture; it is natural to speak, but language is cultural: learning how to speak is some bastard hybrid process. As such, to speak is an act of faith in the social-political-economic order that we come to call our world. Words must be spoken, inhabited, given, or written down, as in themselves they have no essential meaning or hold on reality. As soon as words fail us, we are world-poor, as Heidegger would say of animal life, and what we habitually take for granted and believe is put in question, testing the limits of our faith in this world. This might be the point at which it is customary now to evoke the Nietzschean Death of God. Somehow, with all our arrogance and our ratiocination, we’ve done away with this father figure. But, here, I wish to speak of a theology after the postmodern linguistic turn, because God is still a word. Faith—in all its trepidation—then becomes a lever of intervention, a rebellious no! to passive acceptance of a world that has stopped making sense and to patient waiting for some radical transformation to come.

Chapter 1, Milk of My Tears, establishes God, the Word, as the genesis of linguistic reality, and the genesis of linguistic reality as implying the genesis of a world for a subject and of a subject for a world. Faith is thus the leap into linguistic reality from which a desiring-speaking-being—always a becoming—springs forth. The main character of faith, faith of this subject that is not one, is rebelliousness. Rebelliousness against flat ordinariness, against the penchant to misplace concreteness and attach importance to abstractions—such as assigning undue credibility to normative constructs of the self, against the blind commodification of all values. Rebelliousness is thus how the desiring-speaking-being is able to appropriate the linguistic social phenomenon towards the satisfaction—albeit a strange satisfaction—of her narcissistic drive to be something—something that comes to be and ceases to be—rather than nothing, nobody, a stick-man universal figure.

Chapter 2 makes the case for the ethical worth of a secular theology of language as a way of thinking, of halting assent to ready-made assumptions, of dwelling uncomfortably in the no-man’s-land of life without absolutes, and yet also as the way of forgiveness, the way back into the cold play of socio-linguistic reality. This chapter specifically focuses on indifference as an a priori of thinking, as an inescapable dimension of entry into linguistic reality, which dimension cannot be safeguarded against, and ultimately, must be forgiven. But to forgive indifference is not the same as to be oblivious to it.

Chapter 3 provides an exposé and a tentative analysis of this condition of thought (it looks at dairy industrial practices, Iraq war newspeak, and the strange concepts and recommendations of the 9/11 commission as failed, failing, or simply symptomatic paradigms of this condition of thought) and argues that a theology of language with its vacillating absurd faith in a world without absolutes and always in need of revision makes room—can make room sometimes—for a strange freedom within—yet a freedom from—an always already normative, institutionalized reality. Here, while I do not simply clamor to replace faith with reason (or vice versa), I suggest that any kind of institutionalized thinking—and I include religious fundamentalisms in that category—risks some of the most senseless outcomes.

In Chapter 4, I maintain that the false dichotomy between faith and reason mirrors the false dichotomy between madness and civilization. This chapter, not in its verse, but merely conceptually, could be characterized as a poor man’s modern Praise of Folly, a praise of folly after Descartes, where the tightening ethos of normalized subjectivity forces everyone to declare some form of madness, and where such madness is saner than the folly of normativeness. The rebellious no! to such folly, as an act of faith in this world, becomes both a political act of insurgence and, as its own kind of folly, the least foolish of all the ways to negotiate—to inhabit—finitude.

Nevertheless, part of the folly of such a faith is that it cannot be ascertained or authenticated. The act of faith of a desiring-speaking-being is always more than a simple, unequivocal affirmation. Because such a becoming-subject belongs to a social-linguistic reality to which she must somehow relate whether with trepidation or blindly, and because no faith can ever transcend this reality, Chapter 5 prefers to muddle or render less clear and distinct the difference between faith and belief. In a postmodern relativistic milieu, faith as such is never manifest and can never claim queen status. This is why I distinguish instead between two ways to believe, and I argue that the imaginary can serve to belie and deny any distanciation between the subject as spectator and the fantasy he chooses to believe; or instead, it can provoke and sustain distanciation, it can bring to the fore the real of facticity by way of an imaginary trope—a trope which, on the surface, would appear to disguise the real. Belief of this kind is not simply make-believe in some world of fantasy or willful ignorance of one’s facticity; instead, it signifies the recognition of one’s ignorance and finitude. It is the imagination that gives voice to this recognition, which would otherwise reduce one to silence or denial.

While this is surely not its sole descriptor, a theology of language is also a theology after Lacan. That is not to say that this is a Lacanian theology, nor that one need be a Lacanian to appreciate it. The point, rather, is that the influence of the Lacanian discourse on the question of desire cannot go unacknowledged, even while this influence is almost wholly indirect. As Jacques Lacan brashly put it:

Very soon, you’ll see, you’ll run into some Lacan at every street corner. Just like Freud, you know! Everybody thinks that they’ve read Freud, because Freud is everywhere, in newspapers, etc. This will happen to me also, you’ll see, just as it could happen to anybody if one got going—if one got to doing things a little closely, closely centered on a very precise point which is what I call the symptom, to wit, what is wrong.²

Chapter 6 delineates how a theology of language—after Lacan, though not according to Lacan—as a theology centered on an other, one that it knows is an illusion is both because and in spite of this a desiring theology—a theology destined to desire to no end.³ This desire to no end is a rebellious force against the dulling of life as construed by and siphoned through an inherited normative linguistic reality. This rebellious force of a desire to no end is read against the Lacanian backdrop of accession to the symbolic order as a counter to its passive acceptance, as an active way to engage it, as a theological way into this world-for-us rather than out and elsewhere beyond. Here, the rebellious desire to no end situated at the entry point of linguistic reality will be understood heuristically as the power of neurotic dissent, the power of masochistic perversion, and the power of paranoiac doubt.

In Chapter 7, this work becomes more properly critical. I suggest that Catherine Keller’s mythopoetic vision of God for a theopolitics of love is a theology of language. Hers is a vision that resists even Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo’s weak ontologies for too easily allowing Christianity to stand for the master trope of Western civilization and for not offering a conception of God that can effectively bankrupt his patriarchal archive. Keller’s poetic God makes conspicuous the formulations of alterity that leave God to God even as they strip God of God’s preeminent ontological status. But it is love, in its receptivity and generosity, in its openness and sensitivity, that gives Keller’s vision its creative—its rebellious—power.

Chapter 8 makes the counter-current claim that the theological dimension of a thinking that is open to the rebellious desire to no end is not a historical moment that can be overcome without injury or loss, nor is it the prerogative of theology alone, as a parasitical enterprise feeding off the secularist discourses that castigate any and all things religious.

Finally, Chapter 9 explores the politics of love at the heart of a secular theology of language. Platitudes seem unavoidable here, but in order to evaluate some interpretations and critiques of Christian universal love, I chose to view love heuristically, through the lens of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, as the human being’s best friend, a god, and as the human’s being’s fate, rather than as an injunction from above. Love, an eyes wide open embrace of human love, while messy, unpredictable, and in the end impossible—or impossibly real—is not a shibboleth for willed ignorance, blind faith, or divine intuition even though love is blind, mad and beyond measure.

1

Milk of My Tears

It is without having anything to say that I begin.

The question that I ask is the degree to which, or how it is that words express thoughts. On the one hand, I am talking about both our inability to verbally convey and our preference not to verbally convey all that may be (pressing) on one’s mind. On the other hand, I am also talking about the experience of a certain ignorance that precedes and may also accompany verbalization and that, therefore, precludes any sense of a satisfactory verbalization of one’s thoughts. But what I want to explore and advance in this instance is the possibility that this endless postponement of satisfactory verbal expression comes less from the actual failure of words to correctly signify thought than from the illusion that this is the case. Otherwise put, I am suggesting that words conjure thought. This is not simple phenomenalism. It is not that we only know what we perceive, though I cannot argue against this for some form of noumenal knowledge. But what I want to emphasize is that words must be put into one’s mouth in order to silence, by voicing over, the experience of the ignorance of thought. People often claim to be speechless when asked to recall or describe some extraordinary event. In such instances, words, they might be heard to say, simply cannot describe the feelings or the perceptions. Here, on the one hand, one may be unable to verbalize and unwilling to convey all that may be pressing on one’s mind, but this is precisely because, on the other hand, one may also be facing the ignorance of one’s thought: having nothing to say and not knowing what to say, one is, therefore, speechless.

From this angle, the leap to language marks a new beginning, not out of nothing to be sure, but out of inchoate blind intuition and empty thought. For a theology of language, then, this passage from formlessness to form, or from disorder to order, or from the flux of fleeting feelings to (a semblance of) conceptual stability, or from muteness to voice, insofar as it is the genesis of a linguistic reality, can be named God as discoverable in the New Testament and specifically in John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.¹ Yet this new world or linguistic reality, while stepped into once and for all, is therefore both as young as the new individual born of its waters and as old as an eternal world that thus always precedes and conditions any newcomer. That is, since language acquisition is a fundamental and essential form of socialization, the passage to language adheres to more than some Kantian a priori categories; it adheres also to social norms that order behavior and shape desire. Once these norms are internalized, the self is inevitably conscious of itself as that impartial spectator who will judge and adjudicate what constitutes the proper public disclosure of itself. But any disclosure of the self to itself is therefore a public disclosure, and the properly private self is (paradoxically) more than the censored self, it is incommunicable, a secret to itself included.

If Kierkegaard gave us the conceptual tools to think the leap of faith qua leap, I am proposing that this stage not be read apart from the aesthetic and ethical stages of the individual. Imagine instead the collapse onto a horizontal plane of the linear, chronological stages on life’s way. The paradox of faith seen in this light is that there is no faith without being of this present world; the paradox of faith seen in this light is that while the individual as an individual can only speak through the universal that would negate his individuality, sometimes he does speak. The paradox is that one can speak about nothing, in and through the quasi-transcendental aesthetics of desire and in and through the quasi-transcendental social—and presently (though not of necessity)—capitalistic, Judeo-Christian/secular ethical norms that feed, shape, aim, redress and even corrupt one’s desires. Again, the paradox of faith is that one can be born again into a world that is always already there such that being born again—entry into language—is the avowal of a negation of the individual qua individual, because this individual has nothing to say, possesses nothing, is nothing. Yet this avowal is how the Word is made flesh such that the individual, a being who desires to speak, this pit of ignorance, this pool of fleeting and flickering neuronal activity translates into a desiring-speaking-being here, now, together with others in the world for us. This desiring-speaking-being has no essential core that is unchanging. Even the morphic boundaries of the physical single being that pass for the referent of a singular speaking subject are stubborn for a while only. My point is, of course, that the individual is a construct, a product of the world, the result of complex paradigms, but she also constructs her apprehensions; or, more powerfully put, she can rebel against the formal forgetfulness or indifference or discrimination of sensation and feeling necessitated for entry into linguistic reality and stubborn survival. So, paradoxically, one can never escape from this or any other formalized reality; yet one can be reborn, and reformed, again and again. And that is the point of a theology of language: to dare to invest again and again in a world that is always already old, but which is experienced with each leap into language as entirely new, and ever renewed.

Henri Bergson, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, wrote that to philosophize is to invert the habitual direction of the work of thought.² The habitual work of thought deals in stable conceptions and solid perceptions that miss the mobility of the real.³ But this is the denotative function of words. And so my question, here, is twofold. First, do words conceal or rob the thought which prompts their utterance? Second, to what extent do words conjure up the thoughts from which they presumably are prompted? Applied to a theology of language, from whence comes the language of God, of ultimate desire, of love that surpasses understanding? And does the word God denote or help make possible the reality of whatever it is that we mean, hope, or wish in the name of God?

Consider my first example. If someone asks me: what is your name, where do you come from? I can answer quickly, and most likely without thought. In fact, if I give some thought to the question, and answer that I’ve taken on my husband’s last name as my middle name, and that, I was born in France, but my mother is American and my father is French of Armenian origin, and that before I came to Pennsylvania, I lived in Syracuse, New York, for eleven years, then I’ve really not given the type of answer my interlocutor is looking for. I’ve given thought to my answers, and this means that I can’t really answer the questions. If, on the other hand, I answer that my name is So and So, and that I come from X, then, in some absurd way, these answers don’t refer to me, to what I think, to the thinking being that I know I am when I say something about myself. So I tell you that my name is So and So and that I come from X; meanwhile, I know that I am not telling you the whole truth about my name and my origin—I am depriving my own answers of the thoughts your questions provoked. You want facts about me, I give you facts about me, but in doing so, I eclipse myself.

Consider my second example. I watch young people aspiring to be the next American Idol.⁴ I hear their performance, I know whether I liked the performance or