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January 27, 2005
What is going on, indeed
John Effay writes on the resurgence of christianity in contemporary philosophy:
One of the main reasons I got into philosophy was that Christianity was so
patently ridiculous. Now all I find myself doing is arguing about Catholic doctrine and reading reams of associated material.
I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see someone else saying this, if only to prove to myself that I'm not merely a stubborn crazed lunatic alone in a world of bible-scholars, and to finally provoke me to get this post out.
Of course many of those 'infected by the Badiou virus' are lapsed religious types all-too-happy to quietly relapse. Monotheistic plague injected in childhood, and subsequently suppressed through years of 'acting secular', will naturally rejoice in the opportunity to resurface and roll out the litanies of theological 'debate'. It puts me in mind of the aliens in V, at the moment you suddenly realise that an apparently human character was 'one of them'...the skin ripping away and unfurling to reveal the lizard beneath.
Horror of realisation...they are among us....(in V it was just a matter of nazi lizards from space, reality is far worse, they're born-again lacanian jesus-freaks)
My belief from childhood was always that christianity was essentially an anachronism, a pathetic dying animal. Growing up with no contact (unless vanishingly ambient) with religious practice, except for the forced, tedious recitation of hymns at school, which convinced me even as a child that whatever this thing was, it was oppressive, patently ridiculous, and in its current condition simply a matter of lies and sanctimony. I remember complaining so insistently to a teacher that rather than write about a bible story I was actually allowed to write about why it was ridiculous nonsense, LOL!
Now bizarrely things seem to have got to the point where I feel I should apologise for not feeling any compulsion to immerse myself in christian theology. When indifference to all theology has always been the only honest option. A historical appreciation, an academic interest, is one thing, but this current quasi-piety is something different, and makes me rather uncomfortable. Of course, I understand the hyperstitional position that beliefs express a potency regardless of their "truth-claims". But this position seems twisted out of recognition into an interpretationist programme whose only apparent outcome is to send secular thought into a scholastic ghetto of self-important sermonising. And of course, since it is against all the ills of post-structuralist 'liberation' that this thought sets itself up - its mission is to pipe the foggy, dreary mood-music of the messiah into the smooth space of machinically-evacuated materialism, to save us from the evils of capitalism, from a freedom that is 'not real freedom' because it answers no theopolitical plan.
I assume John's point about analytic philosophy isn't entirely rhetorical - he's quite right, whatever the problems of analytic philosophy the cryptotheological wing of continentalism, indulged for far too long, is far more sickening, and despite its sophistry has nothing to offer to secular thought (I still haven't worked out quite how Badiou's razorsharp rubbishing of romanticism and elevation of mathematical thought segues so easily into his pious calls to the cause of truth). What is especially disturbing is the implanting in people of a supposed obligation to abandon their hostility to monotheist oppression and go back and read the bible a bit more (need we ask why this tendency is so indulged in the academy and its outposts? ...well, what could be safer than a bunch of priests poring over scripture in the safety of their offices?)
Isn't this, in fact, a psychoanalytical gambit - you can't presume to think for yourself until you have 'dealt with' or 'talked through' your christian heritage, until you have thoroughly convinced yourself that you are saturated with god-plague, always have been, always will be, that a smart interpretive subtilization, a minor heresy, is the best you can hope for. That it is "naive" to think that you can ever free yourself, let alone be born free, of god-plague? Go on, admit it, it's God. But I believe the price to be paid for this talking cure, for admittance to the polite chattering society of lapsed-relapsed interpretationists, is too high.
No, I was right all along, in my naivety, in my dogged adherence to the obvious, in my ignorance and indifference? Thanks to all those destroyers who came before me, who made it possible for my parents not to ever mention God to me, to inject me with his poison, I really am an orphan despite what they may think, and I don't feel the need to fabricate a divine affiliation (historically- or personally-lapsed, or otherwise), a belonging, just so I can join the dinner-party disquisitions.
Resist. Long live enlightenment.
Posted by robin at January 27, 2005 07:02 PM