Self-Emptying Subject

Alex Dubilet

Description

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy-Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the Other and Michel Foucault's ethics of self-cultivation-The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life "without a why." Rather than aligning immanence with the enclosures of the subject, The Self-Emptying Subject engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates and subjects life in secular no less than in religious domains, this book challenges the dominant distribution of concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse, which insists on associating transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy.The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G.W.F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative re-writing of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses, and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it for their own ends.

Sujets

• Theology
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823279494
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The SelfEmptying Subject

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The SelfEmptying Subject

k e n o s i sa n di m m a n e n c e , m e d i e v a lt om o d e r n

Alex Dubilet

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s sNew York 2 0 1 8

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Copyright ©2018Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

20191854321

First edition

C o n t e n t s

 Introduction 1Eckhart’s Kenotic Lexicon. Meister  and the Critique of Finitude

2. Conceptual Experimentation with the Divine:  Expression, Univocity, and Immanence in Meister Eckhart 3Estrangement to. From Entäußerung: Undoing the  Unhappy Consciousness in thePhenomenology of Spirit 4. Hegel’s Annihilation of Finitude

5.Sans Emploi,Sans Repos,Sans Réponse:  Georges Bataille’s Loss without a Why  Conclusion

Acknowledgments Notes Index

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23

60

92 123

148 173

179 183 237

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Introduction

Over the course of the last halfcentury, the conceptual pair of imma nence and transcendence has become a site of contestation within a number of discourses across the theoretical humanities. Building on a complex, preexisting conceptual history, the significance, seman tics, and morphology of immanence and transcendence have recently acquired an added intensity, becoming key nodes for discussions across numerous fields, including philosophy of religion, political the ology, contemporary continental philosophy, and the critical reex amination of secularity and secularism. Some of the stakes of these discussions are captured, to take one prominent example, by Charles Taylor’s interpretation of modernity as fundamentally characterized 1 by the formation of an immanent frame. Taylor’s account is notable in the way it makes quite explicit a set of associations and meanings that the terms have assumed in recent usage: Immanence is conceptu ally associated with human selfsufficiency, with the enclosure of the world, and with the secular, and is contrasted with transcendence, which marks an outside, a beyond of the human and its world. After noting the complex genealogy of the concepts, Taylor summarizes these associations by writing that “‘secular’ refers to what pertains to a selfsufficient, immanent sphere and is contrasted with what relates 2 to the transcendent realm (often identified as ‘religious’).” Here, Taylor exemplifies a tendency detectable not only in debates over the nature of secularity and secularism, but more broadly within critical humanities discourse, one that associates immanence with the condition of the worldly and the modern, and conceptually opposes

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it to transcendence (of God), which acts as a kind shibboleth of reli gion and religious discourse. Such associations are entangled with more foundational moments, such as the early writings of Karl Marx, which, reworking the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach, equated the theological and religious with operations of alienation that projected humanity’s essence into abstract, transcendent realms. Although for Marx, these operations are found functioning in legal and political structures of bourgeois modernity, they were, qua transcendent and 3 ideal, taken to be fundamentally religious and theological in nature. More generally, despite a variety of divergent uses, a clustering of meanings becomes intelligible: Immanence names a certain remain ing in (from the Latininmanere) or within the human world and is contrasted to what is transcendent, that which goes beyond or marks a beyond of that worldly totality—a clustering that gains its contours through its entanglement with a set of overlapping binaries—the sec ular and the religious, the profane and the sacred, the worldly and the 4 beyond.

unr est r a ined imm a nence

Few have done more to reanimate the problematic of immanence in productive ways than Gilles Deleuze. Part of the novelty of his thought lies in decoupling immanence from the world and the sub ject, and thereby resisting its adequation with forms of secularism or humanism, however they may be conceived. To take one of his formulations on the topic: “Immanence is immanence only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs AllOne, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, when ever immanence is interpreted as immanentto Something, we can 5 be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent.” Imma nence does not remain immanence if it is immanent to something as a property, be that something the modern world or the transcenden tal subject. Rather, it is through such acts of appropriation that it is deformed and subjugated, becoming merely a predicate rather than that which precedes and exceeds subjects and totalities, which seek to possess it as a property. To consign immanence to being a name for a property of an enclosed totality is to already have betrayed and lost immanence. “Whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent ‘to’ something . . . the plane of immanence revives the transcendent again: it is a simple field of phenomena that now only possesses in a

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secondary way that which first of all is attributed to the transcendent 6 unity.” When immanence is contained within a delimited terrain, it necessarily becomes appropriated and deformed—made beholden to transcendence yet again. The power of such a claim is that whenever immanence is taken to be a characteristic or a property of the subject or the world, it is compromised with transcendence. Immanence, then, indexes what precedes and exceeds rather than simply choosing a side in what Maurice MerleauPonty once called “a controversy between the 7 ism and anthropotheism.” At stake is not the decision between the human and the divine, the subject and transcendence, this world and the other, but the critical diagnosis thattheos andanthropos have always been correlated, two parts of the same conceptual matrix that forecloses the articulation of immanence. Or, as Deleuze once rhetori cally asked: “By turning theology into anthropology, by putting man 8 in God’s place, do we abolish the essential, that is to say, the place?” From such a perspective, rather than simply being the affirmation of the human subject or a secular world (which then stand tacitly in opposition to theological transcendence), immanence would name what is without enclosure, what precedes and exceeds the structured separation of subjectworldgod, a plane out of which may arise not only a multiplicity of gods, but also a diversity of subjects and worlds. When immanence is articulated absolutely, it necessarily becomes divorced from closure and totality, with which it has been repeatedly imbricated throughout the twentieth century. Instead, it is posed or instituted as the plane of absolute experimentalism, openness, and constructivism of thought and life. Replying to such associations of immanence with enclosure, Deleuze and Guattari note inWhat Is Phi losophy?: “The reversal of values had to go so far—making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism) from which the Transcendent 9 will save us.” The formulation suggests a retort to Heidegger’s infa 10 mous remark late in his life that “[o]nly a god can save us.” The point, however, holds true more generally for those discourses that valorize transcendence, and do so by caricaturing what is possible for and in immanence. It is a response to any position that upholds the values of transcendence by associating immanence with a drive 11 toward essentiality and closure, with “immanentism.” Deleuze’s thought announces the exigency of thinking immanence without associating it with totality, essence, or closure—and thereby with out being forced to appeal to transcendence, be that transcendence