In Defense of Total Depravity

As some of you will know, every year I run a small festival in my home town of Belfast. This year one of our guests was the ever brilliant philosopher John “Jack” Caputo. During a discussion in the talks part of the festival someone asked him what the main difference was between the two of us. The question was asked partly because we share so much in common and I’ve been so influenced by his writing. Yet, there still seems a slight difference in our approaches. 

In response Jack said, “I think in listening to Pete this week I’ve finally worked it out, he’s a philosophical Calvinist!” For Jack, the Lacanian influence in my work manifests itself in the proclamation of a lack that touches every part of our being. Something he felt is a philosophical version of Total Depravity. The difference between us then lies in the way that Jack (as a heretical catholic) is much more positive about human subjectivity than myself.

Far from wanting to reject this claim, I think that he put his finger on something very important. The only thing I’d want to push back on is the idea that my position is depressing.

To understand the claim it will be good to briefly reflect on what Total Depravity actually means. To begin with, it shouldn’t be thought of as the idea that humans are utterly and completely sinful, but rather that every part of the human subject is touched by sin. If we take sin as an ontological category rather than an ethical one (something that is actually a conservative theological move, even if it is not one reflected in the contemporary church) then we can define Total Depravity as describing a lack that is infused into being itself.

Theologically speaking this means that Total Depravity defines the idea that human subjectivity is something other than a form of “pure life.” It is rather a form of impure life. It is a life infused with death. In philosophical terms this can be said in the following way: a human being is constituted by a lack at the heart of its subjectivity.

This recognition can actually be seen as the fundamental insight of religion. Namely, the religious impulse is born out of the sense of a lack experienced in the very heart of subjectivity. Rather than explaining religion as the result of some need for tribal identity, as the means by which we come to see the human essence, as a will to power, or as the result of postulating agency in a hostile world, Lacan saw the religious impulse as arising fundamentally from a recognition of the incompleteness hard-baked into the very nature of human subjectivity (a lack formed in and by language). The religious individual experiences this lack and then attempts to stop it up via some signifier such as “God,” “Historical Necessity,” “The scientific method,” or “Evolution.”

By directly affirming the ground out of which religion is born (in its sacred and secular forms), Pyrotheology affirms a form of Total Depravity in that it recognizes the constitutive lack at the core of being, and the various ways this lack is made manifest (the Real). The point however is not to offer up a way of closing down this lack (which is ontological in nature and thus cannot be filled). This strategy of corking up the lack is the way of fundamentalism, and secular philosophies such as positivism. Rather the theory and technology of Pyrotheology is concerned with directly assuming the lack and enjoying the desire that it creates, rather than seeking our pleasure in the closure of the gap.

It is this religion of the gap that I explore in my most recent trilogy of books: Insurrection, Idolatry of God and The Divine Magician.