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January 3, 2018
If you can see it coming, Derrida said, it is not an event. If you already know who is on the other side of the door, it is not hospitality, or only half. If you can foresee the future, it is already present, only the future present, not the absolute future.
Hospitality kicks into high gear (is “unconditional”) when it is impossible, when we suffer a visitation by the impossible, that is, we are asked to welcome the unwelcome; otherwise we are just admitting the same. Jesus's favorite example was love, which comes to a head when we are asked to love the unlovable.
The impossible is the trace of God in a theology of “perhaps.” Where there is the impossible, there is God (for better or for worse). The “perhaps” that trembles in the name of God is the might and may-being of the impossible. The “come” that is common to both prayer and hospitality is made possible by exposing the serene horizon of the possible to the obscene shock of the impossible.
Maranata. Come, Lord Jesus.
I am tempted to say that “come” is the first word in a theology of the insistence of God. But if “come” comes first, it is because it comes second, in response to an insistent knock on the door.
Hospitality is not a character trait of the pious, not just a virtue to be cultivated, or one of several virtues, but the field in which everything we do transpires. Hospitality describes not a particular part but the very structure or movement of life, not our “essence” but the explanation for why every attempt to prescribe our essence is always already outstripped.
Essence is undone by insistence, which is why existence is never merely a matter of actualizing a formula prescribed by essence.
Meister Eckhart famously said, I pray God to rid me of God.7 That is one of the most famous prayers ever made, one of the most radical, and also one of the greatest contributions to the poetics of “perhaps” and a theology of trouble, which in turn visited upon Meister Eckhart himself quite a great deal of trouble.
I pray the God who exposes me to trouble to rid me of the God who keeps me safe, who functions as a guarantor of tranquility and order. I pray the groundless ground of the “perhaps” to rid me of the rock-solid ground of the certain and foreseeable (which is what “providence” literally means).
As the Meister liked to say, “I go further” and I say that this prayer is God's own prayer, that God, too, is striving to be rid of God and to break through to the divine abyss. The insistence of God means that God too is asking to be rid of the God of peace and quiet.
Whatever the liturgical season, Meister Eckhart's sermons are all “Advent” sermons, which take as their subject the advent of God into the soul, the birth of the Son in the soul, and hence the readiness of the soul for this coming.
For Eckhart, advent is a double event, a double birth, both God's and the soul's: the advent of God in the soul is the birth of the Son in the soul and the rebirth of the soul in the Son, with the result that if we block this event, we kill God, by cutting off God's birth, and we kill the soul, by cutting off its rebirth.
So I read the story of Mary and Martha not merely as an allegory of contemplation and action but as an allegory of the chiasmic intertwining of the insistence of God with existence.
Eckhart paradoxically privileges Martha over Mary on the grounds that Martha has a double gift. Martha is busy about the many works, the many material things—meals, clean linens, a swept house—that are needed to welcome Jesus and make him comfortable (vita activa). Her attention to these duties is not a distraction, Eckhart says, but a gift she enjoys beyond Mary who has only one gift, who knows only how to languish at the master's feet (vita contemplativa). Mary only understands God as peace and the promise, but she does not come to grips with unrest and threat.
But when Jesus says, “Martha, Martha,” Eckhart claims that is a mystical symbol that Jesus secretly prefers Martha's world because Martha understands that the name of God is the name of a deed.
Mary savors the name of God, which is edifying but still languishing in inexistence, while Martha responds, which actualizes God's birth and the soul's rebirth, which are one and the same. In Martha, God happens with all the robustness of mundane existence. She knows that if Jesus is coming there is food to prepare, a house to be cleaned, because Jesus is a not a heavenman but a man of flesh and blood with human needs. There is a realism and materialism in Martha that is missing from Mary's beautiful immaterialism that is never made real, and Jesus secretly prefers her materialism. Martha's
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By a “virgin,” Eckhart means that in order to receive God into its home the soul must be pure of all attachments, not only to worldly paraphernalia like wealth and power, but even to religious paraphernalia. By the latter he means what I have been calling piety, the pieties of religion, the pieties of the prescribed prayers, ascetic practices, fastings and vigils, to which I would add the paraphernalia of creedal and doctrinal assertions, which can deprive the soul of its purity and freedom for God just as surely as can worldly concerns.12 So virgin purity signifies religion without religion.
But the purity of the virgin side must be intertwined with the fruitfulness of the wife, with a life of works and with all the accompanying trouble of giving birth. The soul as virgin has an inner purity of intention; the soul as wife has an outer fruitfulness born of an intercourse with the world. The soul must work like Martha, like a busy and fruitful wife, while also and at the same time being pure of attachment to its own works.
But, in virtue of Eckhart's doctrine of the chiasmic event of the birth of God in the soul and the rebirth of the soul in God, whatever happens on the side of the soul must also happen on the side of God. God too must divest himself of his divine properties and names, like “his” and “creator” and even “God” itself, stripping the divine being to the nudity and inexistence of the Godhead, in order to release the event of the birth of the Son from the divine abyss, coming into existence in the soul, in the world. God must be stripped of existence in order for the divine inexistence to bear fruit
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No matter what the official calendar in Christendom may say, in the kingdom of God it is, as a structural matter, always Advent, the advent of the event, preparing our hospitality for the event without adorning ourselves with the pieties of religion and ascetic practices.
We must be clear that the insistence of God does not imply that God is an agent who calls, prays, insists, or does anything. The insistence of God means that God is a solicitation or provocation, not an agent, because agents take the form of Martha: they respond to provocations, making the decision of the other in me. The provocation of God, then, takes place in the middle voice, and the only thing that is manifest, the only thing we can see, is the response. That is the philosophical wisdom and realistic concession behind the adage “God helps those who help themselves.”
There is no more salutary offspring of the theology of events than the recognition that it is human beings who claim to do things in the name of God, which is why the history of religion is inevitably also a history of violence.
Paul says, I live now not I but Christ lives in me. Just so, Christ lives now not in himself, in eternity, but in me. If the Christic is a chiasmic figure, as I treat it, then the soul needs Christ and Christ needs the soul in order to live and move and be.
Pantheism says that our existence is God's. Panentheism says that God's existence is in ours and ours in God's. But in a theology of “perhaps,” God does not exist; God insists, and it is our responsibility to bring about something that exists.
the ambiguity of this unstable middle, across the uneven plane of immanence, the proportionately ambiguous power of agency and freedom makes its wary way.
The hoary theological “problem of evil” thus has nothing to do with all the choices that a sovereign omnipotent and omniscient God could have made but failed to make, thereby leaving us in our present sorry and befuddled state. The problem of evil has to do with the ambient and chaotic play of ambiguous beings, an ambience beyond mere ambiguity, since our choices rarely boil down to two. The ambience of our being is its greatest if riskiest resource.
The insistence of God is the chance that God can happen anywhere. The insistence of God is the inexistence of God, but the existence of God is liable to break out at any time, in great and world-historical events, like Paul on the road to Damascus, and in the smallest things, like the rose that blossoms unseen. No one can see God coming, including God.
By “the event,” which is the motivating idea in everything I say, I mean the advent of what we cannot see coming. Events break out (e-venire), break in (in-venire), and interrupt the course of things.
When something comes, something unexpected, that is the advent of the event and that is the Derridean side of the event. But events also have a Deleuzean side. Events, Deleuze says, are not what happens but what is going on in what happens.
“Breaking out” (e-venire) means that names contain events for Deleuze as virtualities that may irrupt. “Breaking in” (in-venire) means that names contain events for Derrida that may interrupt, as promises of something coming or calling that may take us by surprise. These two work together.
God can break in or break out anywhere. Tout autre est tout autre.
Things are never simply, baldly, and immediately “given” but always already named, interpreted, construed (the hermeneutics of events).
The confessional orthodoxies seek to head off the event, not to welcome but to domesticate it, to fence in the anarchic and aphoristic energy of this name, to police the event by means of normalizing propositions, books, councils, and institutional forces with considerable political muscle, and to use it to their own ends.
When I say theology, I am trying to rewrite orthodoxy's favorite word and produce something impious. I am not interested in “religion” in the sense that Meister Eckhart warns us against—fasting and vigils and observances and doctrines—which is why I speak of religion without “religion.” I am not finally interested in “religion” but in God. I go further: I am not interested in God but in the name of God. I go still further: I am not interested in the name of God but in the event that insists in the name of God.
I pray God to rid me of God, of what I expect God to be. I pray for the coming of the event promised and provoked by the name of God. I go further still: even God is not interested in “God.” God too is praying to be rid of God, insisting on becoming God without God.
What theology was searching for under the figure of the “transcendence” of God—“transcendence” is not a bad word!—as a force arching over or “crossing beyond” the world, is here redescribed as a modality of the world, an unforeseeable worlding of the world, as a way the world catches us up in its sweep, makes itself felt in all its intensity. Transcendence is not the opposite of immanence but another way to configure the plane of immanence, another way the lines of force that traverse the field of immanence are redrawn, intensified and made salient, the way the plane of immanence is bent or
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“Transcendence” describes in my vocabulary the way a horizon of foreseeability is shattered by the coming of the unforeseeable. It is another way of running up against the impossible, up against the possibility of the impossible, against its limits.
Transcendence is a category of the world, a mundane species, a particular mode of transpiring on what is called in metaphysics the plane of immanence, in virtue of which the flow of immanence intensifies and forces itself to the surface.
Transcendence as intensified immanence?
Such a “reversal” of transcendence into a promise of the world, as I am describing it here, invites the consequent “displacement” of the binarity of immanence and transcendence, meaning we need a new vocabulary because this one is dualistic and distortive of mundane existence.
Just so, I treat the “eternity” of God as a figure of a radical temporality.
On one side, a withdrawal into a past that was never present, into time immemorial, and on the other a withholding from the present of an unforeseeable future. The present thus is doubly displaced, doubly stretched out, pulled apart in opposing directions, opened by opposing forces.
The “axiom” of any hauntology of the event, were such a thing possible, is that when it comes to events, to be is to provoke. Events are not present, but what is provocative about what is present.
We would not say that the event is, but that the event provokes. We would not say that God is but that God calls, constituting a provocation that the confessional religions instantiate in some Hyper-being or other, which is the business of the confessional imaginations and no business of ours.
The event is not what happens but what is going on in what happens, what is provocative about what happens. The provocation means that we can never see God coming. God can happen anywhere. Even God cannot see God coming.
I am arguing that whether we treat God as a noun or a verb (ipsum esse), a substantive or a process, everything turns on the “how,” on the adverbial “perhaps,” which is an attribute of an attribute, a mode of modalizing adjectives, nouns, and verbs, disturbing their tranquility, making room for qualities, degrees, manners, circumstances, conditions, and exceptions.
“God is a rewarder of adverbs not of nouns,” meaning of the how not the what.
That is also why I have been emphasizing the middle voice as a resource to displace supernatural agency.21 It is also why I insist that the insistence of God occurs in the subjunctive.
The insistence of God belongs to the power of suggestion, not in the sense of a psychoanalytic reduction of this name to a trick of the unconscious, but in the sense of a suggestive or subjunctive force, the power of a possibility or a perhaps, of an invitation or solicitation.
To adapt a Deleuzeanism, we ought to ask not what God ‘means’ but how we are to play it.
“Irreal” here means a non-reality restless about becoming real, an inexistence that insists on existing. That is why I like to think of deconstruction not as anti-realist but as hyper-realist,
Weak theology, like deconstruction, should be written in the subjunctive, because it is all about subjunctions, modifications of the ontological into the “hauntological,” spirit-seeings which include the de-ontological, the me-ontological and the pre-ontological, every possible mode, manner, or strategy available to us to deflect and inflect the ontological into the spectral. The insistence of God belongs grammatically in the subjunctive, which subverts the settled nominations and conjunctions of the present.
The insistent tension between the "already" and the "not yet" is, perhaps, hauntologically eschatological. The Parousia is already and always coming. In between is where the tension and also we live, move, and have our being. By faith. Maranatha.
