Tracing Violence

In recent years, Slavoj Zizek has become quite fond of echoing Lenin’s old saying to students during socialist times. Just as Lenin himself retreated to Switzerland after 1914 to study the logic of Hegel, the students should “learn, learn, learn” rather than boldly act. In Violence, Zizek suggests this ought to be our contemporary response to violence.  The 21^st century has thus far been one where warfare and violence have evolved dramatically, and so how we theorize violence must shift also.

In her essay titled On Violence, Hannah Arendt, following Engels, draws a distinction between violence and power, force, and strength. Placing violence within the ‘means to an ends’ framework of warfare, Arendt tells us that the implements of violence, the tools needed to perform, are more vital to the future world than the supposed political ‘ends’ to which they were directed. The implements of violence will change the world more than any such political goal. Arendt writes, “The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.” Arendt goes on to say that in this hour of history, one where multiple nations have the power to annihilate Earth several times, the hope for rationality has long disappeared. Now, following Arendt, that the implements of violence have surpassed any correspondence to political ‘ends’, we are stuck in a unending game of deterrence, of which, Arendt concedes there is no answer for how extricate ourselves from this insanity.

But, what if the evolution of violence and warfare were to emerge beyond this unmistakable conundrum and into a framework that is just as dangerous, but so on very different terms, namely, Could we be approaching a moment where the distinction between violence on one hand and power/force/strength on the other no longer holds? Might not the utter evil and failure of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars make crystal clear that the days have ceased when nation-states lined up uniformed troops and fought systematic wars towards supposed goals?

Even if my suspicions come to be true, the world would still be as violent, as destructive. The implications of this, following Agamben, and ultimately Foucault, are that the sites of violence in today’s world have expanded dramatically. In a world that is post-war, in the sense of 20^th century war, violence must theorized at the level where power, force, and strength reside – at the level of the constitution of life itself, for, as Agamben tells us, this is where politics now resides. State versus State warfare is becoming fast irrelevant; central to any anti-war/anti-violence movement is to learn to oppose violence by way of constituting a new form of life, one that is agonistic  towards the mechanisms of the capitalist apparatus of control.

Capitalism is always a Crisis

Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. . . . We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.

—  Invisible Committee from “The Coming Insurrection” (Semiotext(e); 2009)

Death (of/and) the United States: We are Mad (Wo)Men

An evening ago I finished the second season of AMC’s Mad Men, the story of an early 1960’s advertising corporation in Manhattan known as Sterling Cooper. Loaded with philosophical themes of identity, friendship, sex and gender, the show exquisitely captures many aspects of life during this golden era of the ‘American Dream’. But death is the theme from which I want to depart.

In the season finale entitled “Meditations in an Emergency,” the Cold War rhetoric of the day has reached a moment of crisis. Bomb shelters, nuclear war, and communism: all of these concepts signified (and still do) to the American psyche the imminent threat of mass death and destruction. The office radios and televisions constantly have an eager audience of employees schizophrenically consuming the reports, contemplating plans of action to survive the pending chaos.

Only to add to the political crisis is the fact that word leaks of Sterling Cooper’s decision to merge with a London-based corporation. As news of this parallel crisis pulses, the employees fear for their jobs, their futures, their wallets. Only a few rooms away, the partners of both corporations strike the deal that will make them all infinitely wealthier. For the partners, the political crisis doesn’t really matter, and neither does the well-being of their earnest employees. Making bank, nothing else, is what, in the end, matters to them.

In hindsight, one is struck by how incredibly paranoid the employees are over events that were not serious. One is tempted by Mad Men to say that our society has shifted, even progressed, significantly in the last fifty years, but it simply isn’t true. As Halden Doerge has elaborated, today’s “debate” over Health Care reform is indicative of mass American paranoia. Like the employees at Sterling Cooper, paranoid over the nuclear threat and the merger, the potential death of many things, today’s Americans are equally paranoid over a change in Health Care that is infinitely stoked by a 9.7% national unemployment ratio and a global recession headed to hell. And, like nuclear war, health care has an intimate connection to dying – something most Americans, especially the insured, are strangers to.

For the majority of employees at Sterling Cooper who, with lined pockets were chasing women and enjoying whiskey hourly just a few weeks ago, life has now taken a sudden turn towards uncertainty. As in the case of Mad Men, the thought of losing our grip on the apparatus we associate with keeping us alive comes with it a similar, no less paralyzing uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes paranoia.

It is befitting that the decline and death of our nation’s ability to control the world militarily and economically would be accompanied with a health crisis in the homeland. Is this something of pure coincidence? I contend that it’s not, that as we have rightfully perceived the death of our influence abroad and beyond – as we experience our own contingent existence, our own rise and fall – we’ve become paranoid that our heretical soteriology that is the doctor’s office will finally be unveiled as such a false rumor, exposing us to be stood up by a messiah that cannot save.

No less befitting is it that, like the greedy and unconcerned partners of Sterling Cooper, the elite of this land, living life in the face of surrounding sickness and death, go on executing another piracy down the same path of madness, while the non-elite sit and wait for the insanity to cease.

Pacifism, Just-War, and Doxology: Yoder as Militant Pacifist

“To see history is to be empowered and obligated to discern, down through the centuries, which historical developments can be welcomed as progress in the light of the Rule of the Lamb and which as setbacks” (RP, 132).

Central to John Howard Yoder’s pacifism is learning ‘to see history doxologically’; viewing amidst the contingencies of history the truth-actions which don the strangeness of the Gospel. For Yoder, the truth-actions of God are apocalyptic. History, ideology, and oppression are laid open and exposed as violence by such truth-actions. Yoder often references the truth-actions of MLK Jr. and Ghandi who displayed the paradoxical power of meekness and vulnerability of pacifism derived from the grace of Christ’s own Rule of the Lamb.

It is in fashion right now for Yoderian’s jealous of Catholic theology to claim that Yoder’s engagement with Just-War theorists ultimately amounted to an understanding that pacifism and Just-War are basically compatitible.  It is well-known that Yoder, who is noted by theorists like Romand Coles for his active vision of radical receptivity and dialogical vulnerability, engaged Just-War theorists in debate. Yet this debate hasn’t ended with the understanding that Yoder’s ‘principled because messianic’ pacifism is basically identical to Just-War theory.

Here I want to suggest that it impossible to fully understand Yoder’s pacifism without his radically doxological vision of history. For one ‘to see history doxologically’ is to see oneself with only one option in the face of historical conflict: love thy enemy, for this is only revolution. One acts in light of the truth-actions of the ones who have looked radical violence in the eye and chose love over murder, hospitality over exclusion, and water over bullets. For the Just-War theorist/practitioner, in the face of conflict, there is still a decision; there is still the possibility that the peaceful witness of Christ is abandoned for this ‘exception’. And, this has happened, throughout the tragic history of Christianity again and again at the world’s peril.

John Howard Yoder was a militant pacifist: he believed that history was doxology. That God acts and those people acting in the form of Christ, revealing the violence of the ‘principalities and powers’ at every turn were truly the ones who make history doxologically. For Yoder, because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, cruciform love – martyrdom – is the only christological response to conflict. No war is just; no enemy is outside of the reign of Christ’s forgiveness and love.

Contingency, Apocalyptic, and Cormac McCarthy

To my knowledge, no novelist explores the pure contingency of our world better than Cormac McCarthy. It is surely one, if not the main, theme of No Country for Old Men. Each time hit man Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) flips the coin, effectively deciding who lives and who dies, he welcomes the chaos; opening a space for chance, the essence of contingency that beholds us here on Earth.

The Road, McCarthy’s popular post-apocalyptic novel, makes a world where humanity’s attempt to put its stranglehold on contingency has led to a crippling decay. The immanent terrain, from coast to coast, is littered with death, decay, and the dead do not look after the living, for there truly are none. The form of life created by McCarthy’s main characters, a father and his son, is one of wander – keep going – despite the becoming-dead of that which remains with breath. What is said between father and son is not important, but rather what isn’t said. There is a singular bond, and although it isn’t spoken, but felt, the unknowable force of love still lies beyond the countless shadows of death.

The world of Cormac McCarthy’s beautiful work isn’t the illusory world of many contemporary Christians. There is no God in the sky, fashioning the daily lives of his faithful so that they are protected from the force of contingency. There is no God behind the exploitative processes of capitalism constantly arranging events, keeping an eye on our well-being. The world is violent, uncomfortable, and not created for the flourishing of human beings. It is a cold world. The synthesis of experience has no underlying purpose, headed for no such progress, and denied a goal.

Few have experienced our contingent cold world like Jesus of Nazareth. The one who came preaching peace, freedom to the captives, and liberation for the poor and hungry bore the brute contingencies of a particular socio-political and economic milieu by way of crucifixion. Unlike the ones who once ruled the dead world of The Road, fashioning their technology, hospitals, prisons, and war-machines to hopelessly stave off the threat of contingency and imminent death, Jesus Christ came to rescue the strangers, the prisoners, the poor – to offer a new life of hope – despite their being banned from the circle of power. Like the unspoken love of a father and son, constantly interrupting the journey on an unknowable path of contingency, Christ interrupts the contingency of human history, bears it, and opens history apocalyptically (indebted here to Nate Kerr’s explosive ‘Christ, History, Apocalyptic’). As Christ chose to dispossess the world, so must we, choosing to graciously love it, rather than foolishly fashion it the way we think it should work.

An Update of Kinds

I hope to begin writing again. The last six weeks I’ve spent living in other environments, getting married, traveling, and moving – all of which was beautiful and great.

Now that I’m back in the valley for a while, I am reading again, and preparing to continue the (radical) democracy and tradition conversation. I hope to also add a few book reviews in the near future.

Of late, I’ve been reading some Derrida commentaries, essays on Theodor Adorno, and now I’m quite engrossed into Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock. A couple weeks ago, I read Marilynne Robinson’s highly acclaimed Gilead, a book I would recommend.

I’ve been spending some occasional time, mostly for curiosity’s sake, reading up on speculative realism – which boasts an impressive web-based network.

Nihilism and Pacifism: David Bentley Hart and the Postmodern’s

Nihilism

Just recently, I finished The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart. It is certainly one of the more acclaimed works of theology to appear in recent memory. Most impressive, to me, besides the author’s vocabulary and sometimes elegant prose, is the scope. Hart’s interlocutors are many, and chief among them are the giants of postmodern philosophy – Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, and, of course, Nietzsche.

Save the nuances, for Hart, what the respective philosophies here have in common is a drive towards nihilism – whether the ‘trace’ of Derrida, the denial of embrace in Levinas, the death of the metanarrative, or Deleuzian affirmation. At day’s end, Hart accuses these well-known philosophies as inherently ontologically violent because they cannot maintain difference peacefully.

Hart’s critique is tempting, absolutely. His case is that a Trinitarian ontology of peace in the form of an analogical relationship of distance between creator and creature ultimately holds together difference peacefully, in infinite beauty. Such a theology, one would assume, would lead one to embody the ‘form of Christ’ in a cruciform manner wherein forgiveness and invitation into participation in the life of the Spirit are critical. However, Hart explicitly states that he is not a pacifist. Which, as a pacifist, leads me towards a position that can be summed up as such: to label the postmodern’s as nihilist may certainly be true, however their vision of being in the world seems to be much more convincing than a vision called an ‘ontology of peace’ that cannot commit to being pacifist. In other words, if you advocate for a Trinitarian ‘ontology of peace’ yet cannot advocate for radical pacifism, I find the postmodern’s to represent a far more convincing way of being in the world – nihilist or not.

In Christian grammar, to not be pacifist is to deny the endless potential of cruciform forgiveness and the possibilities of pneumatology to usher forth entirely new events: it is to accept the nihilism that one human will kill another. For Hart, Milbank and others of those stripes, unless the ‘ontology of peace’ can be brought to its ultimate ethical conclusions – that bearing the ‘form of Christ’ means refusing to kill – I’m not convinced that they have overcome ethical nihilism itself.

Theologians Reading Philosophy Constructively

In similar light, some of the best examples in my mind of theologians reading and using the work of philosophers constructively are William T. Cavanaugh’s use of Foucault’s conception of ‘panopticism’ in Torture and Eucharist and Chris K. Huebner’s usage of Hardt and Negri (among others) in A Precarious Peace. This constructive approach bears much fruit, as the work of these two theologians has been enriched by these engagements significantly. Hart’s work has been influential, but his constant polemic against the so-called nihilist champions of postmodernity becomes quite shrill: surely, these thinkers weren’t as careless as Hart makes them out to be.

Chris Hedges on Obama and the Middle East

Hold Your Applause:

The expanding imperial projects and tightening screws of repression lurch forward under Obama. We are not trying to end terror or promote democracy. We are ensuring that our corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive we become. This is the game playing out in the Muslim world.”

Obama in Cairo: Reflections on Religion, the Market, and ‘Progress’

Yesterday in Cairo, the rhetoric employed by the U.S. president Barack Obama was refreshing. As many on the right are pointing out, he didn’t once use the world ‘terrorist’. He greeted the audience with an Arabic ‘thank you’ – shukran – and inserted the word ‘Holy’ before he quoted from the Quran. Such rhetorical gestures as these are a welcome turning of the tables from the Bush years. We can finally show respect to the 1 billion Muslims with whom we share the world.

I know, personally, from my experiences traveling in the Middle East, in Cairo among other places, that what the U.S. president says really does matter – they remember it. Gestures such as these will, without doubt, go a long way towards softening the perceived tension. Certainly, this is something to be desired.

Central to Obama’s political career so far is his realization that we inhabit a globalized world. In other words, America doesn’t matter: no longer does America decide global politics, the market is sovereign. This is the central premise to Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, two neo-Marxists, whom diagnose the present world order as one led by the apparatus of the global market that now operates and effectively controls all political, social, and economic activity throughout the world: wielding a magnificent ability to smooth over all difference in its conquest to sweep up the entire globe with its invisible hand. The nation-state is now a servant of Empire, even the United States.

As Hardt and Negri are clear, “Empire” takes on many American characteristics: most importantly, it accepts and any all, offering a ‘freedom’ to whomever to participate. This was the explicit invitation dealt by Obama to the ‘Muslim world’ yesterday – “This is what it means to share this world in the 21st Century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings. This is a difficult responsibility to embrace, for human history has often been a record of nations and tribes, and, yes, religions subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership, our progress must be shared.” For Obama, what is a stake in order for the world to ‘progress’ is not the subjugation of one religion over another, but the subjugation of religion in general: religions, or traditions, are self-defeating so long as they insist on an ethics and a metaphysics that demand worship over against the markets immanent “freedom.”

‘Progress’ for Obama, then, means stepping out of the primitiveness of tradition, and entering the “peaceful space” of the world market. Killing for oil is not primitive, but killing for your religion is. Tolerance, then, must be embraced. Not a vulnerable and transformative dialogue, but a mere tolerance. As Obama said, “People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive.” This tolerance, however, is also essential for the market to thrive. So long as religion remains privatized – “of the mind and the heart and the soul” – and never manifested or embodied publicly it poses little threat to forming its adherents into better followers than consumers.

“I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations: to live in peace and security, to get an education and to work with dignity, to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.” This is the truth for Obama, a truth that “transcends nations and peoples, a belief that isn’t new, that isn’t black or white or brown, that isn’t Christian or Muslim or Jew. It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world. It’s a faith in other people.” In other words, the truth is that Obama’s god is the god of the market: faceless, nameless, devoid of a particular history of actions. On the contrary, the God’s of the three monotheisms are transcendent, historical and particular, calling followers to a metaphysics, an ethics and a politics counter to any secular political order. Such convictions must be relegated to the private, lest the world will not ‘progress’ according to Obama’s heretical theology.

Obama’s hope is clear: one day the ‘Muslim world’ will progress and arrive at that moment where its traditions and practices will become a thing of the past, something for the sentimental, and what will arise will be a belief in the only thing left: the market. Finally, then, will the market have an eschaton.

Implicit in such thinking is a form of Orientalism. The day that Obama yearns for has already arrived in the West. At its pinnacle of progress, religion and tradition in the Western world is a matter of the private sphere unless it completely supports the secular political and market-driven order. Couched in charitable rhetoric, Obama simply asked the ‘Muslim world’ to “progress” just like the West. The unbelieving and anti-Metaphysical West put all the faith it had left in the market, and now is asking the ‘Muslim world’ – a thoroughly believing entity – to do the same, and for what? That they may kill for consumer goods instead of God?  

Obama, as the man charged with maintaining Empire, will likely never start a pre-emptive war, but his modus operandi is war by other means: drop hold of your traditions and your beliefs and join the marketplace – for this is telos of history, a place where beauty, truth, and meaning are reduced to the endless dissatisfaction of consuming shit.

John Howard Yoder: Seeking the Peace of the City

The ecclesiology of John Howard Yoder stands uncomfortably in the Radical Reformation tradition. Yoder, often, wishes the church to be in diaspora – wandering, adapting, engaged with the very newness that surrounds it. If read in light of MacIntyre and Hauerwas (indeed many of the post-liberals), it is clear that on the contrary Yoder rarely emphasizes the need for the church to be fixed and stable, rather his ecclesiology is more about dispossession, disowning, and dislocation.

The revolutionary words that YHWH once spoke to Jeremiah, “Seek the peace of the city where I have scattered you,” serve as the basis for a Yoderian ecclesiology. Yoder assumed that the church would never be stabilized, but, instead, it would risk pushing itself out into the mess of world. For Yoder, this would constitute an ecclesia in diaspora.

Yoder’s For the Nations, a response to Hauerwas’ Against the Nations, is focused on how to speak publicly about gospel values without worrying about those perspectives (ideologies, worldviews) from which the gospel claims might be challenged (For the Nations, p. 21). Ultimately, for Yoder, speaking in public (part and parcel of the democratic ethos) about the gospel is eschatological. Following Barth, Yoder writes,

“That Jesus is Lord is a statement not about my inner piety or my intellect or ideas but about the cosmos. Thus the fact that the rest of the world does not yet see or know or acknowledge that destiny to which it is called is not a reason for us to posit or to broker some wider or thinner vision, some lower common denominator or halfway meeting point, in order to make the world’s divine destination more acceptable or more accessible. The challenge to the faith community should not be to dilute or filter or translate its witness, so that the “public” community can handle it without believing, but so to purify and clarify and exemplify it that the world can perceive it to be good news without having to learn a foreign language” (p. 24).

The challenge to the church is to embody the gospel values before the watching world whose destiny is ultimately fellowship in the kingdom. Yoder develops five “body politics” which speak the gospel values in robust fashion to the world. In characteristically analytic fashion, Yoder lists them:

A. Egalitarianism as implied by baptism into one body: “According to the witness of Galatians and Ephesians, baptism proclaims an order in which Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free have been reconciled not by being homogenized but by accepting one another…The equal dignity of both kinds of people, those with and those without the heritage of Torah, was affirmed not on the grounds of the possession by both of certain *virtues*, but on grounds of the cross…Our world still needs to learn that the reason every person and every kind of person must be seen with equal respect is not that their culture is equally healthy, or that they have earned equal treatment, but that equal dignity is ascribed by virtue of a divine bias in favor of the Other” (Ibid, pp. 29-30).

B. Forgiveness: “No economy can survive without Chapter Eleven; no prison system is viable without parole. No moral culture works without making scapegoats and celebrating rituals of exculpation” (Ibid, p. 31).

C. Eucharistic Socialism: “Eucharist, thus substantially and historically, functionally understood, is the paradigm for every other mode of inviting the outsider and underdog to the table, whether we call that the epistemological privilege of the oppressed or cooperation or equal opportunity or socialism. To make such sharing seem natural, it helps to have gone through an exodus or a Pentecost together, but neither the substance nor the pertinence of the vision is dependent on a particular faith” (Ibid, p. 32).

D. The open meeting: “As the early Christians met for worship, all of them were free to take the floor. The more talkative were told to listen, and the more timid were encouraged to speak out. The only mandatory guidelines were procedural, so that all might be heard. Though that liberty was understood as the working of the Spirit of Christ, its shape was the same as what a truly open Parliament, therapy community session, committee of the whole, or town meeting attempts to be. From this original Christian vision has come the stronger strands of what we call “democracy,” a vision which does not say that “the people” are always right, or that a majority is, but only that decisions will be better and community more whole if all can speak” (Ibid, p. 32).

E. The universality of giftedness: “The same Spirit which gives every individual the right to the floor also qualifies every individual for his or her own role or service in the body…In a culture where the star system has been enormously aggravated by the media, as by the fortune 500, as by civil politics, we need to rediscover the ways in which the individual, the local, the ordinary can be validated” (Ibid, p. 33).

Vulnerability – a posture constitutive of radical democracy – is found in all of these body politics. A diaspora ecclesiology is constantly in a state of vulnerability that dwells at the edges of the public, yet still must witness by these body politics. From a MacIntyre/Hauerwas perspective the risk of this is too costly – the possibilities of liberal attitudes seeping into the conversation could be destructive of the community. Directed towards Hauerwasian’s, Yoder maintains, “They will not risk the challenge of telling the world that servanthood, enemy love, and forgiveness would be a better way to run a university, a town, or a factory. They pull back on the grounds that only they have already experienced the power and novelty of that threefold evangelical cord in the worship and ministry of the church. The affirm integrity but at the cost of witness” (Ibid, p. 49).

Ultimately, the church is to seek the peace of the city, according to Yoder. Yet, the church lives out of control, offering its own politics as a gift demanding nothing in return. Such a posture is only intelligible in light of the vulnerable relations of Trinity: the cross of Christ, the Spirit of Pentecost, and the Father who breaks down the barriers on the way to peace.