You’re Looking For Nothing: John Caputo Responds to My Work

John Caputo has long been a monumental influence in my life and work. From the first time I randomly picked up one of his books (On Religion) in a little bookshop in Belfast back in 2000, to the present day where I’m working through his stunning philosophical memoir Hoping Against Hope (I’m honored to be writing the forward), he has been a constant guide, mentor and conversation partner. Not only this, but over recent years I have been able to get to know him personally and come to know him as a friend.

Recently, while at a conference in Turkey, John was asked about my work and he expressed some concern about the Lacanian turn I had made, particularly with my interest in Žižek. This comment was posted up on the “What is Pyrotheology” Facebook page and generated some interesting dialogue.

I must admit that when I read the comment I was very pleased. The idea that John was commenting on my work, let alone engaging seriously with it, meant the world to me. He had already publicly endorsed me in 2011 when he, controversially, put together a panel dealing with my work at a philosophy conference he facilitated called, “The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion” (his last conference in Syracuse before retiring). But the fact that he was still taking my work seriously was very affirming. 

Yet he was concerned that the comment might be taken out of context. So today he clarified what he meant on the “What is Pyrotheology” page.

His comments might be of interest to those of you who are keeping an eye on the direction of my work. In addition to John’s comment I have also included my small and inadequate response, as well as a link to a short post I wrote in the aftermath of John playfully claiming I was a crypto-Calvinist at my Belfast festival in April 2015.

 

John Caputo’s comment:

As my comment about regretting the influence of Žižek on Pete’s work has drawn some comment, I think it’s a good idea for to clarify what I am saying, lest anyone think I was criticizing Pete, whom I love dearly and have always supported as best I can and was decidedly not criticizing. In fact, it was the opposite. I was in the middle of saying that my hope is that Pete’s work will catch a wave, a big book, say, that will move him on to the next level and widen his circle of influence. I then added that my main fear is that, under the influence of Žižek, his audience will be narrowed to the radical death-of-God set and that will confine him to a narrower niche. I think his own native genius has a broader appeal than that. That I have understood to lie in exploring the dynamics of undecidability, the undecidable tensions between faith and doubt, theism and atheism, fidelity and betrayal, how to speak and not-speak of God, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and the underlying sense of life that subtends these oppositions. I think that has a wider reach and it would nourish a growing number of people today, like the “nones,” some of whom still go to church but are wondering why, some of whom no longer go to church but still believe something, they just do not know what, people who are “inside/outside” religion. In my view that undecidable flux is crushed by Žižek, where the dialectic is reduced to a dogmatic double negative, no, no. So I was talking about audiences.

But over and beyond this question of strategy, of reaching an audience, lies an interesting philosophical question, condensed in the “crypto-Calvinism” comment someone made in the Belfast Tricksters meetings. This Pete has glossed in terms of a radical “lack,” which is a lot better than “total depravity.” This raises a really good question which, as I see it, concerns how to address our “finitude”—we are conditioned and limited beings who come to be and pass away, fluctuating between being and non-being, as Augustine liked to say. One way is through the myth of Original Sin, a fall from a state of pristine peace and innocence into sin so that we pass our lives in the aftermath of the fall. Freud and Lacan, I think, give us the secularized counterpart to this Jewish myth by way of the Greek myth of fate, of Oedipus, of the impossibility of maternal plenitude, where we pass our lives in the aftermath of this loss. I greet the first myth, which is mostly due to Augustine and grows even larger teeth with Calvin, with incredulity. There never was—either structurally or historically–any such original purity to lose. I greet the second myth with no less incredulity; there never was any such Oedipus triangle to contend with, a point which is developed with some vigor in Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus. I greet any myth of a originary fall or loss with incredulity, as a mythologizing of our finitude. I am a heretic about both these orthodoxies.

How then should we think finitude? In terms of our primordial temporality by which we are structurally turned toward the future, and therefore in terms of the “perhaps,” of an originary possibility. To be born therefore does not mean to “fall” into time from eternity, or to “lack” eternity and to be stuck with time. We are originally, and originarily, temporal beings, and that while decidedly finite is nothing to wring our hands over. Time is our first and last chance. To be born is find oneself in a nascent state, neither sinful nor sick, but in a state of beginnings, of natality (Hannah Arendt), in an originary open-endedness to what is to-come, for better or for worse. To be sure, this is a risky situation. From the outset, we stand before the promise/threat, and nothing guarantees a good outcome. We have not fallen from somewhere; we do not “lack” anything, which means we are missing something we are supposed to have at this point; we have not “lost” something we were originally given. These myths of fall and loss don’t ring true to me. They’re just too downbeat but more importantly they reflect a misunderstanding of temporality. Rather, our finitude is our dependence. The child is a new beginning and so just beginning and not an articulate autonomous agent. But the world is not just beginning. As soon as we come to be we find the world is already running. That is the first case, our first encounter, with the injustice of an unjust world, and our first, harsh lesson in the logic of the “perhaps,” of the promise/threat. The first injustice is an accident of birth—the terribly deprived and desperate condition in which some children are born, while others have every advantage, immersed in love and in an environment by which they are supported on every side. There is the true lack and loss, the first case of missing something that is supposed to be there, viz., the misfortune of being born abandoned, neglected or in desperate poverty. There is nothing mythic about that, no grand récit about some primordial Ur-event of loss, no metaphysics of the void, thank you very much.

So on my accounting the being of finitude is may-being. That means, on the one hand, that there is no Divine Providence to ensure a good outcome, nothing to guarantee life may not be a disaster, just as, on the other hand, nothing says we are born sick or in sin, living in the aftermath of some mythical lost plenitude or innocence. The temporality of our lives was well described by Kierkegaard as a “repetition forward,” producing what we repeat by the repetition, like a songwriter picking at a guitar trying to find something that does not yet exist, a gradual up-building or on-going construction of the set of fragile, contestable and deconstructible meanings we call our lives. The temporality of this process is not structured around a primal fall, loss or lack, nor around a total or even partial depravity. On the contrary, it structured around an archi-faith in the coming of what we cannot see coming; an originary hope against hope that the future will be better; an originary love of the possibility of the impossible. These three, faith, hope and love, to which I add a fourth, a specter that spooks the whole thing, and sees to it that it may turn out to be a disaster. So these three, plus a little luck, bon chance, which the theologians call grace, and I qualify as the “nihilism of grace,” the grace of life, which is a finite, risky, bracing business.

Whether our difference here is a difference of emphasis I will leave to others to judge, because in the end Pete and I are on the same page, affirming the “difficulty of life” as I called it in Radical Hermeneutics, in the face of which we must learn to laugh through our tears.

 

My response (John goes by “Jack”)

I’m keen to respond to Jack Caputo’s beautifully written reflections and might do so in more depth on my website. But I’ll say a couple of things now. Before I do though, let me just say that I realize the ridiculousness of me responding to Jack when his work is so much more thought through and penetrating than my own. I am here to learn from Jack, and am so profoundly grateful that he would engage in this way.

First, commenting on the comments related to strategy/reach, Jack is right that my influences at the moment do limit me somewhat. I’ve missed out on at least one very big platform as a result, and it is something I need to reflect on more as I attempt to vulgarize (hopefully in the positive sense of the term) Radical Theology.

Secondly, I just want to make one quick point about the ‘lack.’ I fully agree with Jack that there is nothing we have lost. The point that I steal from Lacan is that the loss comes first (Original Sin), and the sense of loss generates the idea of something that was lost. Loss is constitutive of subjectivity. But nothing lies behind the loss (i.e. no Original Blessing).

I am drawn to Jack’s incredulity toward grand narratives, including the grand narrative of absolute negation. However I tend to see the Lacan/Žižek lack as something primarily related to a logical necessity in the birth of the subject. Anyway, just wanted to clarify that I agree with Jack that there is nothing lost. Indeed the sacrifice is pure gain… the birth of the subject. Just as some pre-societal idilic state of nature is not what was lost by the development of society, but is actually a fantasy created by it. In other words, our castration (as individuals and subjects in society) is not a loss but a pure gain that is experienced as a loss.

 

Some addition sources:

Here is a short post I wrote that clarifies what I mean by Original Sin

You can follow John Caputo on Facebook here

You can request to join What is Pyrotheology here