The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

by John D. Caputo

Radical theology and confessional theology do not differ as do two competing doctrines, as two existents, but as an insistence and an existent, as a spook or spectral shadow and an actuality.

Radical theology is confessional theology confessing “perhaps,” yielding to the pressure of “perhaps,” to the insistent stirring of the event.

But what I mean by “radical” is not foundational but non-foundational. I do not mean radically grounded but radically exposed. Radicality for me refers to our inescapable exposure to the unforeseeable, which requires having the spine for the “perhaps,” the willingness to be a sheep among wolves, innocent as a dove, savvy as a serpent.

Radical theology is a memoir of the blind. Like Meister Eckhart, one of the patron saints and inspirations for this spooky art, I pray to the “God” that such a “theology” seeks, which is God, perhaps, or all the God, perhaps, we are going to get, to rid me of the God served up in the propositions of orthodoxy.

the old “logos” of theology is replaced with “events,” which are addressed by a poetics, not a logic. To put it in Paul Ricoeur's terms, it is not a logos but an event that the mythos gives us to think.

I am interested in not the logos of classical theology, which is lured by a dualistic logic of two worlds that provides its mythic architecture, but in the event that is harbored in classical theology.

God is death, and death is not a dead end but a key that unlocks celestial doors. O death, where is thy triumph? (The question, it should not go unnoticed, is met with the unbroken silence of the dead.) The logic of the old ontologic is best addressed not by a logical counter-argument but rather the way Johannes Climacus addressed Hegel: not with logic but with laughter, with the comic, like the hilarious holy cards of unctuous saints.

God means the death of idols, ontology included(!?!). He who sits in heaven laughs, "Hahaha!"

If I am asked what proof I have for radical theology, I plead for a little sympathy: how is one supposed to prove there is a ghost? My only proof is that you already know it, meaning you have been spooked by it, so my poetics follows something like the “method” employed by Zarathustra: you know it but you will not say it.

If the logos is the tranquilizing agent, the poetics is the radicalizing agent, resulting not in the il-logical but the alogical, the displaced logic, the specter of “perhaps.”

In radical theology (confessional theology becoming circumfessional, theo-logy becoming theo-poetics), the logic of transcendence is displaced by a poetics of the quasi-transcendental.

A poetics is not a theory of art or sensuous feelings; it is not a work of art and it does not mean “poetry,”4 even as it does not fall back upon a feeling of dependence (Schleiermacher).

I argued some time ago that what does the work of “ethics” in a theology of the event is a “poetics of obligation,” which gives up looking for deep metaphysical foundations of obligation and learns to appreciate the groundlessness of what is happening in obligation.5 Here I am arguing that theology undergoes a parallel transmutation, learning to serve as a poetics of the event insisting in the name (of) “God,” to appreciate what it insists in the name of God so as to bring it to words in an alternate genre or discursive form—without heading for the hills of apophatic silence and without straying on to the bombastic battlefields of theism and atheism.

I find common cause with all postmodern theories of religion intent on “overcoming onto-theology,” which reject the classical metaphysical logic by which traditional theology has been sustained. These theories have variously taken a linguistic, cultural, or hermeneutic turn that concedes that we have no access to overarching ahistorical prelinguistic metaphysical principles with which to buck up the classical faith.

In this version of postmodernism, religion is taken as a Vorstellung that can only be appreciated in a poetics. But my poetics lacks a Concept, which is the point at which this ceases to be a Hegelian point and swerves off into a Hegelian apostasy.

My argument, in short, is this: radical theology is the becoming radical of confessional theology, and this is only possible as theopoetics, and theopoetics turns out to be a poetics of the event.

The confessional theologies are the only theologies that exist, while radical theology, which does not exist, insists or haunts the confessional theologies.

Theology conceptualizes the beliefs of the community, regulates its practices, and subjects its scriptures to a critical reading that establishes the guiding interpretation that defines the community and its traditions.

Radical theology does not report back to the confessional community or seek its authentication there, and reserves for itself the right to ask any question, without regard to whether it fractures or divides the community or causes schismatic conflict and confessional breaks or engages in revisionist readings of classical scriptures. Radical theology emerges both as a demand of thought, which has the right to ask any question, and as a demand of praxis, which seeks to suspend any claim that privileges an inherited legacy, which is an accident of birth (a historical community).

Postmodern radical theology sets out in search not of rational universality but of hermeneutic universality, let us say the universal of universal hospitality, where “universal” means being willing to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and “rational” means that there is nothing that cannot in principle be discussed. Hermeneutic universality means accepting universal risk, being willing to put one's own presuppositions at risk, as Gadamer said,8 and to give a hearing to anything that puts them into question, to say that perhaps the other one knows something I do not know and is going to say something I did not see coming.

Postmodern theory thus is not pre-modern, pre-rational, or anti-rational but questions standard-form (modernist) rationality, radicality, and universality. It recognizes the universality and multiplicity of “singularities,” which are never simply particulars included under a universal, even as it thinks the origin is divided, never a simple source, so that its root system is as Deleuze liked to say “rhizomatic.”

So the fiction embedded in the hermeneutic universality of radical theology is exposed by conceding that those of us who meddle in radical theology are just like everybody else and are always already in the middle of some confessional community and a complex of other communities.

We too have a community or meta-community to report back to, from which we are seeking “authentication,” and we submit to a vast and complex system of protocols and censorship, just like everybody else. To begin with, to the extent that a radical theology could ever be formulated, it would typically report back to a specifically Western community. It would normally be situated within the Western monotheisms and have recourse to Western philosophical discourses steeped in deep-set notions of presence, essence, idea, substance, subject, up to and including the very notions of “religion” and “philosophy” and “theology,” the whole constellation of what Heidegger liked to call “metaphysics,” meaning not an academic discipline but the entire historical, cultural, and intellectual framework of Greco-European civilization.

Secondly, as the becoming radical of confessional theology, radical theology will inevitably reflect a certain confessional pedigree, background, and tradition, the existing tradi...

Radical theology is parasitic upon confessional traditions, feeling about for the events that take place in such traditions.

Finally, almost any kind of theology today, confessional or radical, will be the product of an “academic” theologian, which means that it “reports back” to a powerful disciplinary system of academic protocols.

However much we like to think that thinking belongs to the order of the gift, that it is a vocation, and I am not saying that it is not, it also is rigorously inscribed within the increasingly corporate economy of “academe,” with the result that its freedom and hermeneutic universality are something less than it likes to think. Its unfettered freedom is also fettered to earning a living, something to which the throng of young jobless PhDs we have produced can testify better than can I.

The brutal truth of the corporate economy of "acadeME" is tethered to the undenial fact that ME still have to eat like every other non-academic ME.

I posit that there are midnight moments when confessional theologians toss and turn with the haunting thought that what they call a gift of grace is in fact an accident of birth—that, had they been born in another time and place, they would have entirely different things inside their heads than the things they defend in their daytime theologies. That radical confession is what I mean by confessional theologians becoming circum-fessional, in which the accent switches from confessio as professing a creed to confessio as confessing how deeply exposed to events we are.

The presuppositions of rationalist theology are transcendental and ahistorical, invoking a so-called “pure” reason which proclaims its universal immunity from any possible “perhaps.” Inasmuch as postmodernists are dubious in the extreme about the latter, the presuppositions of postmodern theology are either hermeneutic or deconstructive.

Hermeneutics in the sense of Gadamer or Ricoeur presupposes the “truth” of the religious tradition or classic, its enduring viability, its continuing power to fuel the tradition in ways that are ever changing yet ever “true” to itself. The “truth” of the tradition does not lie in a changeless body of beliefs but in a changing but enduring form of life.

It insists upon the radical contingency of any historical tradition as an effect of the play of traces; it denies that any such tradition has a privileged access to the essence or Wesen of things and hence to any deep truth, and settles instead for the insistence of the event. That means it settles for a more contingent truth and is more nominalistic about beliefs and more pluralistic about traditions. It takes beliefs and practices to be but relatively stable and hence also relatively unstable, and provisional unities of meaning inscribed in différance or, as Derrida liked to put it later on, inscribed in the desert sands of khora, of khoral spacing, and productive of “chaosmic” results.

deconstruction must not be mistaken as something destructive or merely skeptical because at its heart deconstruction arises not from negation but from a deeper affirmation of something, I know not what, from a faith (foi) in an event, heeding a call, an exigency, a summons, an injunction, an imperative.

As opposed to the relative secrets we keep from one another which can, in various contexts, be revealed, either because of a court order or because we cannot keep our mouths shut, the absolute secret can never be revealed and this because it is absolutely and in principle unknown. We can't disclose it because we don't know it.

We are hanging on by faith, hanging on by a prayer, left almost without a prayer, praying a prayer without a prayer, without knowing whether there is anyone to pray to. That is the real trouble with prayer, which is why we pray when we are in trouble. The trouble with prayer is that it brings with it even more trouble, the way praying for faith implies we lack faith.

As a matter of terminological usage, Derrida himself prefers the English “perhaps” to “maybe.” That is because “perhaps” suggests happenstance and chance, and hence is closer to what he means by the “event,” while “maybe” is more closely linked to the being and potentiality of metaphysics. But I have not given up entirely on “maybe” and I especially appreciate the ambiance of “might” (strong) and “might be” (weak, subjunctive). See Jacques Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997): 1–18.

What is the difference between “perhaps” and khora? Almost nothing.

I am always feeling around for a non-foundational sense of “radical,” for a radical risk or groundlessness as opposed to a single absolute ground or foundation.

The event is the singularity of the unprogrammable.

“Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God…” “Beati Pauperes Spiritu,” in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 422.

In Greek, the middle voice signifies a reflexive action that begins and ends in the subject, as when I say in English “I give myself time to deliberate.” I am using it in an impersonal sense to say things are getting themselves said and done without an identifiable agency under the name of God, instead of saying that an agent God does things.