I posted a few more personal reflections on last week’s The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast (here and here), which turned out to be more professional (i.e. academic) than I thought because, on reflection, I failed in trying to move from the intellectual to the existential and from information to transformation. But, as Jen summarised in a great comment on one of those earlier posts, ‘We are all in a different place between intellectually protecting ourselves from what triggers the hurts of the past and letting go of past hurts enough to fully experience the present’.

I then posted two pieces about the academic paper that Pete Rollins asked me to present at the retreat, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’, in which I looked at the wider theological and philosophical frame and political the significance of Pete’s work (here and here). My forthcoming book, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices (Ashgate, 2014), will go into much more detail about the relationship between Pete’s work and contemporary deconstructive and materialist theologies, and the research I hope to do next will focus more on the political potential of practices like ‘suspended space’.

But today I wanted to write another personal reflection – although it’s also somewhat professional, because it’s about my style of presentation, and whether or not I can speak to the churches.

I posted yesterday about the first part of my talk, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’, which focused on some of the radical theology, atheology and a/theology that has influenced Pete Rollins’ wider theological project.

Photo of Ikon’s 2009 Greenbelt performance, ‘Pyrotheology’, from pyrotheology website.

Talking later with someone at the retreat, they asked me why they needed to know this background, and it made me think about why I had chosen to present it. Obviously, I did so partly because that was what Pete had asked me to do. But I also realised that my desire to present some of this history reveals my own preoccupation with reading Pete’s work for information.

As a researcher exploring the impact of continental philosophy and radical theology on everyday religious discourse and practice, I spend most of my time reading for information, tracking the influence of philosophical and theological ideas on the work of people like Pete. But, as I talked about in this other post here, this often means that I miss the ways in which his writing aims at transformation and not information.

So when I reflected on how I’d structured my talk, I realised that I’d focused in the first half on information - on the theological and philosophical heritage of pyrotheology – but had spoken in the second half about the transformative potential that I see in Pete’s work.

Positioning pyrotheology philosophically, I charted a trajectory from Nietzsche’s declaration of the event of God’s death to various theologies, atheologies and a/theologies of the event of God – which you can hear echo in Pete’s pyrotheological project. Positioning pyrotheology politically, however, I then traced the ways in which it has been influenced by what I call philosophies of identity suspension that can be found in the work of figures like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who see in Paul’s Letters a new form of universalism.

In Galatians 3.28, Paul writes, ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’.

In one of his chapters for Church in the Present Tense, Pete writes that this verse is at its core a form of identity that ‘cuts across political, cultural, and biological divisions, one that involves the laying down of such identities’ (p. 23):

There is neither high church nor low church, Fox nor CNN, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israeli nor Palestinian, hawk nor dove, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, priest nor prophet, fame nor obscurity, Christian nor non-Christian, for all are made on in Christ Jesus (p. 24).

Pete speaks of churches as suspended spaces, in which participants’ identities, including their religious identities, are left ‘at the door’ to create a space of ‘neither/nor’, in which they can explore a different mode of social relation and through which they hope to transform social and political practices outside these liturgical spaces. It is imagined that this suspension of identity can offer a different vision of social, political and economic life in the West – what Pete calls ‘a theatrical performance of that Messianic time when all will be equal’ (The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 178).

The practice of suspended space is charged with political potential by a philosophy of identity suspension that can be found in the work of contemporary thinkers like, Badiou and Žižek.

Video from Simon Gros of 2012’s International Journal of Zizek Studies conference.

I’ve already written about two related challenges that I faced at Pete Rollins’ The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast last week. Because of my religious background and my role as researcher, these were the challenges of moving from intellectual to existential doubt and of moving from information to transformation.

Yesterday, I used Ikon’s transformance art event The End as an example of a moment in which I was able to reflect on the shift from intellectual engagement with ideas to what was literally an instance of ingesting ideas. I said that if, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, belief is unconscious – embodied in our material practices and actions – rather than conscious, we might intellectually or cognitively believe that the end is always already nigh, but in our everyday existence we act as if we don’t know this. Because to really and truly (bodily, materially, existentially) know what we already (cognitively, intellectually) know would be too traumatic.

I thought that, in the moment the dust from the coffin reached my lungs, I made a shift from an intellectual engagement with the idea of death to an existential experience of death and decay, physically ingesting and therefore knowing bodily what had previously been a merely cognitive affirmation.

But as I chatted on Facebook yesterday with others who were at The End last week, and who were left feeling undone by it in different ways, I realised that the level at which I had engaged with this event, and the level at which I am continuing to engage with it, remains an intellectual one.

For example, when I started breathing in the dust, I was still being present as a researcher, trying to distance myself from what was happening and to supress my own bodily reactions to it. I was there going, ‘Don’t cough, don’t cough. You’re a Critic, you’re a Critic. Don’t let people know that this got to you. Don’t let people see this idea sinking into your body’.

And it’s also clear now that my own way of actively avoiding a truly existential engagement with The End was to use the transformance art piece as a whole, and the moment of the dust cloud in particular, as a way of thinking about the relationship between ideas and the material ingestion of ideas!

So, in the end, at The End, I failed.

Last week, I was in Belfast for Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat, named after his fifth book, The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. The four-day event was designed to enable participants to explore Pete’s work in the city where his theology and practice took shape.

I was asked to give a presentation positioning Pete’s project of ‘pyrotheology’ within a broader cultural, political and religious frame. I’ll briefly outline some of the points I made in my presentation in another post, but in my first few reflections on the event I want to write up some of the ways I introduced myself, my work, and my presence at this retreat to the group before beginning my talk.

I’m from a Church of England background, with the church I was part of as a child and teenager being fairly high Anglican. This is quite different from not only most of the other participants in the Belfast retreat but from Pete himself as well as many other public figures within emerging Christianity, who tend to come from broadly evangelical religious backgrounds.

As with many liberal churches, my church community wasn’t particularly comfortable with changes in form. I remember being frustrated as a young person that we had to fight so hard to get things like alternative worship services once a month.

Image credit: Dave Walker.

Theologically, it felt like we were very comfortable with Jesus’ humanity, with the message of the social gospel, with a historical critical approach to the Bible, and with what might ultimately be called a Christian humanism. But not at all comfortable with experiences of God – or at least a certain kind of expression of experiences of God.

I feel like my church background is primarily intellectual rather than experiential. And a background like this comes with its own very particular baggage when approaching Pete’s work.

A rough cut of an interview I did after “Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?” (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri). George Elerick was asking me questions on behalf of Emigre New Monasticism.

In my first ever interview, I talk mainly about my work at the intersection of philosophy, theology and religious studies, exploring in particular how continental philosophy and radical theology are impacting everyday religious discourse and practice. I also introduce the direction that I want to go in next, looking at the political potential of various philosophies of identity suspension and of the emerging practice of suspended space.

Apparently there were a load of questions that didn’t get asked, so I’ll think about posting responses to them when I get back from this event in Belfast next week.

The makers of The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema return with The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Sophie Fiennes use their interpretation of moving pictures to present a compelling cinematic journey into the heart of ideology – the dreams that shape our collective beliefs and practices.

I heard today that my funding application for a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes was unsuccessful. I’d been so hopeful that I’d be able to have a nice three year chunk of time to study continental philosophy, philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul, the notions of suspension and potentiality, feminist philosophy of religion, and critiques of identity politics. Not to mention three years when my husband and I would finally, finally, know what was happening in our lives. Sigh. I’m really disappointed.

The feedback from the shortlisting panel was that they were ‘very impressed with the quality of [my proposal’s] structure and the richness of its content’. But that, after much discussion, they thought my application ‘had the character of a proposal for a research project which included a monograph rather than [for] a postgraduate research studentship as commonly understood’.

So, in essence, it seems like my proposal was too good.

But Bev Clack and the head of the History, Philosophy and Religion department seem keen to meet up to talk about writing a post-doctoral funding application, and they seem genuine rather than just being placatory after disappointing me about the PhD in Philosophy. So we’ll see what comes of that.

Still no money. 

But at least there’s another funding bid on the horizon.

To celebrate three years of unemployment since I finished my PhD in Religious Studies, I’m applying for a second doctorate, this time in Philosophy, in the History, Philosophy and Religion department at Oxford Brookes University. While this is obviously an attempt to fund my work any way I can, I’ve thought hard about how a PhD in Philosophy will enable me to position myself as a philosopher, as well as a researcher of religion, and I’m really looking forward to working with Bev Clack and gaining more of a grounding in feminist philosophy of religion. As a PhD in Philosophy, my proposal focuses on the philosophical aspects of my work in more detail, leaving aside the empirical study of the emerging church practice of ‘suspended space’ which has been a feature of some of my other research proposals. Here’s some of the final draft:

Introduction

Contemporary philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul argue against identity politics and standpoint epistemologies in favour of a generic humanity or universal humanism. For philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, identity politics fragments humanity into special interest groups competing for recognition within the existing social system, thereby weakening possibilities for political resistance and collective action. However, feminist approaches to religion and politics have traditionally utilised identity politics and standpoint epistemologies in both scholarship and activism. This project asks what a political, feminist philosophy of religion might look like against the backdrop of this ‘turn to Paul’, by examining the relationship between these readings of Paul’s Letters, on the one hand, and feminist philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and approaches to the study of Paul, on the other.

Slavoj Zizek, “A Reply to my Critics” (audio), Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 28 Feb 2013.

Although most of the critiques to which my work was exposed in the last years are “so-called” fast denunciations not worthy of a serious reply, some of them do at least raise pertinent questions: which, exactly, is the status of violence in social life, and how can one justify resort to it? Is in our societies a radical social change - not just a revolt but the imposition of a new order - objectively possible? What is materialism today, beyond the usual versions of deconstructionist discursive materialism, Deleuzian “new materialism”, and scientific naturalism? And, last but not least, what immanent role do jokes play in theory?

Q and A (chaired by Costas Douzinas) here.

Slavoj Zizek helps me say Happy Valentines Day to my husband, Simeon Wallis. ;)

A blog post on Zizek mania at the Times Literary Supplement lead me to wonder whether we should give up Zizek for Lent. I can’t, obviously; I’m trying to finish a book about him. But, you know, maybe next year…

I’ve just finalised my presentation title and abstract for the upcoming Subverting the Norm II conference, “Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?” (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri).

I’ll be presenting along with Tad DeLay on the topic of psychoanalysis and the church. 

My paper is entitled, “A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist: Psychoanalysis, A/Theism and the Philosophy and Politics of Identity Suspension”, and here’s the abstract:

Emerging Christianity has recently been described as a resource for the construction of cultural identity. However, I argue that radical elements within this milieu should be more properly understood as forming part of a wider political rather than social movement, concerned with the suspension of identity rather than with its formation. I introduce the work of Lacanian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, in order to detail the psychoanalytic philosophy of identity suspension that underpins what Pete Rollins calls the emerging church practice of ‘suspended space’. Žižek’s philosophy charges this practice with political potential grounded in a universal humanism rather than in particular communitarian identities, including religious identities. This means that the new kinds of Christians that are emerging ought also to be new kinds of atheists – ‘a/theists’. 

Jack Caputo’s next book, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, forthcoming with Indiana University Press (Sep 2013) is now available for pre-order. I’m very excited to get a mention in his chapter on Slavoj Zizek.