Brian Hamilton

New blog: Memoria Dei

Just before scattering for the Christmas holiday, a few friends and I started tinkering with the idea of a new group blog written by a handful of theology grad students at Notre Dame, and that blog has now begun in earnest: we’re calling it Memoria Dei. Besides myself, there are two other regulars so far. Andrew Prevot is a third-year in systematics, and Noel Terranova a second-year in liturgy—but both are incurable generalists, so their areas of concentration don’t mean much. I hope you’ll add it to your readers, follow along, comment, etc.; it promises to show quite a bit more life than this place has of late.

24 January 2010 | Comments (0)

Which discipline?

For the most part I’m quite happy with my decision to end up studying ethics, rather than philosophical or systematic theology, since it’s nearly always the material meaning of philosophical concepts I’m interested in emphasizing. But I do sometimes have a pang of regret, not knowing when it is I’ll finally have a chance to do the kind of reading I’d really like to do in Trinitarian debates, fundamental ecclesiology, etc. It may actually be that I occasionally regret not being a philosopher: what really fascinates me in the Trinitarian debates is the viability and consequence of the thought of the infinite, and my real interest in fundamental ecclesiology has to do with the essential relation between individual and the collective subjects… Though in a philosophy department of the sort that intrigues me, I doubt if I would have been able to think those questions in an unapologetically theological frame; or at least, a great deal of prolegomena would always seem necessary.

Not really saying anything. Especially after a long conversation this afternoon about “making ourselves marketable” to one institutional niche or another, just once again feeling the strictures of academic life that, as often as not, severs thought into so many discrete lifeless pieces.

13 January 2010 | Comments (2)
Tags: Academia,Personal,Whining

Property

I confess that over the past several months, I have set myself a very determinate research agenda into various theories of property for no good reason whatsoever, except that I was  annoyed at having no determinate research agenda at all. Turns out almost nobody has a research agenda until they force one on themselves third or even fourth year, which makes me feel better. But imposing some kind of focus has been fruitful. By the end of the spring term, I’ll have essays on property in early Marx, Locke/Rousseau, Aquinas, and Bonaventure—the last of which I’ll be presenting for a session on Franciscan political thought at Kalamazoo next May. I just finished up with Marx a couple weeks ago, and even though I’m not terribly happy with the paper, I have the unfamiliar but very pleasant sense that it’s going somewhere. As it happens, this is extremely good for morale.

(Note: I’ve posted a slightly more substantial explanation of why this is coming to interest me over at Memoria Dei, and more posts on this theme can be expected over there as I work through Bonaventure this spring.)

7 January 2010 | Comments (0)
Tags: property,research

The principle of necessary mediation

One of the aspects of Dionysius’ system I’ve been trying to get handle on is what you can call the principle of necessary mediation: the lower ranks of the hierarchy can only receive the divinity through the higher ranks. The point of the principle, believe it or not, is not to absolutize the place of the bishop or any other church authority. Dionysius’ treatise on the ecclesiastical hierarchy assumes that some such principle is in effect, but it’s not a point of explicit insistence. The point of the principle, rather, is to say that the angels are absolutely necessary in relaying the divine word and the divine activity to human beings—that’s the reason that they, above all other creatures, are fittingly called angels or messengers. If the ecclesiastical hierarchy also works that way, it’s for the precise reason that the ecclesiastical hierarchy ought to be a perfect image of the celestial one.

That doesn’t rule out the possibility that this is all just ideological obfuscation, of course. And the fact that Dionysius offers literally no philosophical defense the principle might lend some credence to that interpretation. (The defense he does offer is scriptural: showing that Ezekiel, Moses, even Jesus only received the divine will through angelic intermediaries.) I’m inclined, though, to think Dionysius is being genuine here, especially since he’s creating this whole concept of hierarchy more or less ex nihilo, and affording himself a relatively low status. But then I’m just left baffled. Why insist on this principle at all? Even if there’s good reason to say that no one has gazed upon divinity directly, that there’s some necessary mediation there, what could possibly be the point of insisting that all communication from God be stepwise? And that not only knowledge of God is so mediated, but that the knowledge of the higher angels is as well?

5 December 2009 | Comments (6)
Tags: dionysius,mediation

On Žižek on MacIntyre

I wrote a little critical essay on MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? last night for one of my courses, whose main purpose was to begin thinking through the significance of MacIntyre’s secret affinity with “liberalism”—an affinity that seems to me fairly clear, despite himself, and seems to me not a superficial tension in his whole project. Reading The Ticklish Subject tonight, it seemed to me that his critique of multiculturalism could map pretty easily onto certain of MacIntyre’s points.

Though MacIntyre is certainly right, Žižek would say, to accuse liberalism of a false universality, of claiming a neutrality that masks their hidden partiality, he fails to recognize the obverse truth, that in championing particular, internally coherent traditions, he himself masks the “universal” excess of his own judgment. He therefore ends up making the opposite criticism of liberalism than is necessary. Instead of insisting that we fill back in the notion of universality with the contents given it by one or another rival tradition—which is, after all, only the reactionary negation of filling it in with a content that transcends traditions—we ought instead to negate the negation, and insist that we leave the concept of universality totally empty, as yet undetermined by any particular political arkhe or all-encompassing concept of “the good and the best.” We should insist that the discovery of such an empty universality constitutes liberalism’s true advance, and that their mistake was to try to “complete” it with some determinate positive content just like the Aristotelians had always done.

13 September 2009 | Comments (12)
Tags: Alasdair MacIntyre,Slavoj Zizek,Universality

The one sure point

No matter how much philosophy and theology I read, no matter how wildly my allegiances swing, John Howard Yoder always just sounds right to me.

7 September 2009 | Comments (2)

Judith Butler and theology

I’ve been reading Butler’s Gender Trouble over the past couple weeks. It’s my first direct exposure to Butler, and just understanding her is arduous enough, but of course I’m also trying to keep track of the ways in which her thinking could be put in play within theology (possibly against her will). I thought I’d put down a few apparent connections along that latter line, and see if others had anything to correct or add.

Obviously on the issue of the phenomenological and ostensibly natural structures of gender and sexuality Butler has all kinds of direct relevance. In particular, she demonstrates exactly the kind of critique that one would need to rigorously lay waste to ‘theology of the body’ type thinking. It would be counterproductive to set it up as an issue of Butler vs. JPII, of course, but the structure of her arguments—which tend to identify the element in an account that intends itself as critical or subversive (e.g., the constructedness of ‘gender’) and extend that element to the point of subverting what that account takes as fixed or natural (e.g., the ontological stability of ‘sex’)—would work delightfully well against that style of thinking.

Obviously, too, her implicit but direct criticism of ‘theological’ or ‘religious’ thinking deserves to be mulled over. I don’t know whether or not this is consistent in her other writings, but in Gender Trouble, these adjectives take on a fairly specific Nietzschean meaning (especially clear on pp. 76-77). Thought is designated as theological or religious when it produces and absolutizes some unattainable law, an ‘inevitable and unknowable authority before which the sexed subject is bound to fail.’ I can think of two sources for this kind of designation: one, the (Lutheran) interpretation of Paul according to which the whole purpose of the law is to prove to us our sinfulness; two, the (voluntarist) idea of God as a wholly inaccessible lawgiver. Both sources have been subjected to quite a bit of criticism by theologians themselves of late, but Butler could be read as identifying these as structural problems for theological anthropology and ethics broadly speaking rather than just as issues for Jewish-Christian dialogue and the doctrine of God.

The connection that’s been occupying me most lately, though, is a bit less direct. I think it’s possible to read Gender Trouble as a series of theoretical interventions aimed at showing that any appeal to an ‘original,’ ideal, precultural structure of existence is bound to fail. Part of it is her radical social constructionism, of course, wherein it’s simply impossible to appeal to a precultural or prelinguistic anything. But there’s something else, too: she’s just as disparaging towards theories based on future ideals as on purportedly original ones. I’m not quite clear on how this argument goes yet, because it’s not quite as close to the surface of her text. (Perhaps it would be in some of her more recent political writings.) It has to do with at least three claims:

1. Appeals to extra-cultural ideals—i.e., ideals completely heteronomous to ‘the law’ as we know it—inadvertently reify the existing culture itself (the clearest statement of this in Gender Trouble comes in her critique of Julia Kristeva);
2. Ideals, even though they’re intended as critical alternatives to some existing culture, are more often than not effects of that culture which serve to quietly support it rather than subvert it;
3. The very structure of the ideal ultimately restricts cultural possibilities rather than expanding them.

This critique has plenty of momentum among other recent continentals, too: it figures in Nancy, Agamben, Ranciére. And it calls into question an enormous number of theological concepts. The kingdom of God, the body of Christ, the promised land, the exodus, the garden of Eden, the fall—all of these function, to one degree or another, as paradigmatic “original” instances of something (the state of perfection, the church, God’s saving work, the prelapsarian situation, etc.).

20 July 2009 | Comments (8)
Tags: Judith Butler,Method

Google’s new OS

On the heels of Google’s announcement of “a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System,” Jason Kottke writes:

OS X might be the last important traditional desktop operating system, if only because it runs on desktops, laptops, the iPhone, and the inevitable Apple netbook/tablet thingie. But even OS X (and Windows and Google Chrome OS and Gnome and etc.) will lose marketshare to the WebOS…as long as users can run Firefox, Safari, or Chrome on whatever hardware they own, no one cares what flavor of Unix or tricked-out DOS that browser runs on.

Kottke has been anticipating this for years, and has some great things to say on it.

9 July 2009 | Comments (0)